STC Literature

All good things must come to an end

2011-05-15T13:06:00.000+08:00

I have come back here after quite a while of inactivity to discuss a couple of things. First and foremost is that I think I'm going to stop posting to my blogger pages. Primarily, I've just been keeping up with STC Literature, while, and letting my music blog, notes on a sidechain, and my flash fiction blog, splinters, fall by the wayside. And now, just shy of 100 blog posts on my writing blog, I'm getting things ready to swap over to a bright, new, better maintained, more appealing, more professional-esque blog. If you're wondering why I'm letting go of this blog, when it still functions perfectly fine, those are my reasons. Nothing else.

Part of this reasoning was that I had to create an entirely new web presence for my writing and new technologies class at uni, but part of it was that I felt like this blog wasn't reaching its desired audience. That's not to say there's anything wrong with the people that have been reading this blog. On the contrary, they are great people with lots of talent.

I started my new blog/s quite a while ago, and the reason why I haven't made this post earlier was partly due to my working on that/uni work and such, and partly due to the fact that it's currently being assessed, which means I can't change anything to it until I get my marks back. Which should be some time over the next week or so.

So, here's the blog that's replacing this one: http://themanifold.wordpress.com/
Its main purpose will be to talk about writing, and reviews and occasionally about what's going on with my writing. I'll probably copy across some reviews and things from here at some point. Basically, that blog will be a lot more open to discussion, as opposed to this one, which was only really a combination of writing, talking about my own writing, and talking about books. I'm still talking about books, and talking about my own writing occasionally, but also talking about writing in general, things that are going on, writing techniques and such, stuff that expands on to other ideas and such. And I'm keeping the creative writing in self-contained blogs linked from there, and what's not self contained I'll be pushing for publication. So there's still a section set aside where people can see my writing on display.
And these places are: http://apunkalypse.wordpress.com/
And: http://billydemonseed.wordpress.com/
And on top of that, I will be contributing to the new bizarro central site: http://bizarrocentral.wordpress.com/
And still on top of that, I am currently working on a choose-your-own-adventure blog for my writing and new technologies unit, which, if all goes to plan, will be up in a few week's time.

Yes, I've been doing a lot since I haven't been blogging on here so much. And while I haven't been able to use my new writing blog over the past couple of weeks, I'm pretty deadset on taking that one on as my main writing blog once I get my grades back and I can use it again.

Now, the other thing I wanted to talk about here today. What is likely to be the last topic of interest on this blog before I stop. Things that just don't end. You know that feeling when something is just so brilliant you wish it would never end? That won't last. I think the phrase is "flogging a dead horse". I gather that refers to a racehorse that's had a wonderful track record and instead of letting it retire as a beloved national treasure, they keep racing it past its prime and its standard slips and they keep racing it and it just keeps getting worse and worse and the jockey "flogs" it to get everything out of it and keeps trying, long after the horse can race no more, and thus, "flogging the dead horse". It happens all the time with tv shows. A show is popular, it keeps getting renewed for another season and another season, and the ratings start to drop and they try to pick them back up and they're left with the decision to keep trying or give it the axe. It's a lot better to quit on your own terms, rather than rush an ending that was never intended to be.

At least it's not so bad with sitcoms, which are cyclical in nature. Not too much changes from season to season, so it doesn't really matter which order you watch the episodes in, you still find it entertaining and you still find it making sense. But the thing is, then you end up with oh so much of the beloved sitcom on your hands, so much of what captured you into the show in the first place, and then you can't tell what's what and you feel like it's all overdone, the dead horse is well and truly flogged.

A tv series, or even a book series, since I like to talk about literature (I'm getting to that part!) has a much different narrative arc to a film or a novel, as films and novels have much different narrative arcs to short films and short stories. A series has a lot longer to set things up than a single text. At the end of the film or novel, everything has to be wrapped up and satisfying. The series can pull as many twists and turns as it likes, because it has until the end of the season to wrap them up. It's not uncommon for some series to leave loose ends, even major plot points wide open at the end of a season, to keep interest for the next season. Each episode has its own narrative arc, which is part of a larger season's narrative arc, which is part of the show's narrative arc. Which is sort of closer to the real world than movies or books that have a difinitive ending. So I guess that's why people like stuff that shows no sign of finishing.

But I've grown comfortable to the fact that when I read a book or watch a movie, I know that it will end. I know it won't play around with my emotions, teasing me, kicking me from plot twist to plot twist, which I start off enjoying, until I get to a point where I'm all like "fuck you guys, I'm sick of this teasing, I'm leaving!"

I got bored of the Simpsons, as I'm sure a lot of people did, when, after 22 years of the show (I have not been around/watching the show for nearly that long) I get bored of watching the same family living in the same house, interacting with the same people and behaving in the same ways more or less for such a long period of time. Sure, I can still watch it and laugh, but I think there's one thing sitcoms don't do as well as other series with larger plot-arcs, or novels and films with definite endings. It's that I can't watch whole seasons of the Simpsons like I can other shows. It's the sort of show I'll watch an occasional episode of and enjoy the fact that year after year, it's still in the same place. And I can say the same for Family Guy or American Dad, which I watch on a much more regular basis. But I think what we really crave for in a story is change. We want character development. Something to really latch onto and find ourselves caring about. Bart is still a little rebel, Lisa is still a little nerd, Homer is still a big fat dumbass and Marge is still a pestering housewife. Now, I haven't watched the show in a long time, but I'd be surprised if, on the larger scale (not on an episode by episode basis) these characters were anything different.

We are raised to believe that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. And while I like to play around with those preconceptions myself, I can't escape that. I like stories with change and development. I like stories that are going somewhere. A little while ago, I read the first eight volumes of the graphic novel series, The Walking Dead. It's great, brilliant. Lots of character development, lots of great plot twists, and at the end of each episode, there's a gut-wrenching twist that keeps the tragedy of the zombie apocalypse going. Now, I'm faced with two options. I can continue reading volumeby volume to keep up with this story which has captured my interests, or I can wait until the next eight volume compendium comes out and read another bulk portion of the story as one. Or I suppose I can wait until it ends, although I have heard that the writer has no plans on finishing any time soon. This bugs me. Even in the eight volume compendium, there was no greater narrative resolution at the end. There was just more conflict, build up, climax, resolution, plot twist, conflict, build up, climax, resolution, plot twist. It feels quite formulaic for something that is so captivating. Especially since each episode is more or less the exact same length. From episode to episode, there's just no knowing when it will end. My best guess is when all the main characters die. But then throughout the series, more main characters are introduced, so probably a better estimation is when everyone in the zombie apocalypse is dead. And I have no idea when this will be, and as I have to wait for the writer/artists to figure that out for themselves, let alone write the ending, this upsets me greatly.

And with that, I shall let this chapter of my blogging saga come to a close. I will still check up on comments and such, should people still visit here and want to talk about stuff after I've moved over to the manifold for real. I'll probably eventually make a similar post about neverending stories on the manifold as a point of discussion. So, yeah, thanks for reading this blog for the past year and a half. I hope if you're reading this that means you're interested in what I have to say, and will follow me across to my new blogging home.

P.S. I apologise for the amount of unbroken text here. I promise, the manifold will not nearly be this long-winded and tedious. The times that I do write this much, the text will be broken up with pretty pictures.

The Egg Said Nothing, V for Vendetta, 10 A Boot Stomping 20 A Human Face 30 Goto 10

2011-04-02T17:49:00.000+08:00

Every time I post something here, I feel like I haven't done much on here for a while. I only made one new post for March, despite reading 2 novels, 4 novellas, a poetry collection, a graphic novel and 1000 pages of ongoing serial comic. I've also been writing essays and stories and poems and such.

At uni, I'm doing a unit this semester that's done entirely online. The idea is that we're making use of the internet as a space for writers. And for this unit I have to create a number of new "nodes", such as a twitter account, blog, youtube account, blog, podcast or blog. As a warm up for the creative assignments for the unit, I whipped up this fictional blog: http://billydemonseed.wordpress.com/ and my assignment blog, which I'm starting to pull together now, is a poetic/minimal webcomic. I don't draw/paint much, so it's really sketchy as shit, but it's fun. The thing is, now I've got two blogs I'm going to dump my creative works onto then leave once they're done. I may or may not continue Billy Demonseed, however, I have turned it into a print zine. The thing is, I've got to have at least one other "node" and I'm definitely not recording any creative content to put onto youtube (I don't have the resources) and I'm definitely not doing twitter.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to make a profile blog and link it back to my pure fiction blogs. I've been playing around with the tools over at wordpress and while I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, it would make sense to make the blog there. I only really need to maintain it for the next three weeks, but I'm wondering whether I should consider it a trial of sorts, to perhaps start my personal blog afresh now that I've got a clearer sense of direction with where I want my writing to go and how I want to go about it. Then there's the question if I want to hang onto that one after the three weeks, do I keep this one for book reviews or take them over there too and spread them out amongst posts about other things? I think it would make more sense to do the latter, to keep it all tied in. I mean, my music blog and flash fiction blog on my blogger account are just sitting there collecting dust, and this blog hasn't really been about my own writing for quite a while now.

But anyway, I came here this morning to write THREE book reviews because I am fantastically behind the times now.

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The Egg Said Nothing - Caris O'Malley

This is the third book I've read from the New Bizarro Author Series, as recommended to me by Steve Lowe (author of Muscle Memory). I read this back towards the end of January, but one thing I remember about it was that it was really good.

Muscle Memory and Bucket of Face were really good, but this was my favourite out of the three. Why? It's a lot darker and complex. They're all really comical, but this one is comical in that violent Kill Bill sort of way. Blood spatter comical.

The Egg Said Nothing is about a guy who wakes up to find that he's laid an egg. There's no logic to it, and it's something he has a lot of trouble getting used to. Then the time paradoxes and murdering begins and I won't hurt your head (or mine) trying to explain how everything works because it's just tragically suicidal.

The writing is great, clever, logical, yet desparate and sprawling. My impression is if Chuck Palahniuk started out writing Bizarro, it'd look something like this. Honestly, I can't wait to see what Caris O'Malley puts out in the future.

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V for Vendetta - Alan Moore & David Lloyd

This is the first graphic novel that I read. I love it. I saw the movie first, and I really enjoyed the movie, but the graphic novel is just something else. I guess the reason why I chose this over other graphic novels/comics was because I'm not a fan of superheroes. I never really got into batman or spiderman or superman. Sure, I watched the X-Men movies and the Batman movies and enjoyed them for what they are, but V for Vendetta, it utilises the comic book space to put its best foot forward.

Since reading this I've read a good chunk of the Walking Dead zombie apocalypse series and the Watchmen graphic novel (the latter story also written by Alan Moore in the '80s). Now, I don't want to write off all superhero comics as comic book geek trash, and while I'll get around to writing about Watchmen later, the reason that drew me to these graphic novels was the story. The writing. Moore is a genius. V for Vendetta is a fully rounded story that has a beginning, a middle and an end. There's a lot of plot and character development, and it's all ridiculously well thought out, considering it was originally released as a serial comic. It's not like the comic or the sitcom that brings everything right back to the start at the end of the issue, or that has a cliffhanger ending, where the only purpose is to keep the series going.

It's a benchmark for dystopian literature. It's dark, it's gritty, and while it's got the good vs bad hero factor that superhero comics do, the enemies are posed as real people, the heroes often act in ambiguous or morally questionable ways. This is something that crops up in the Watchmen too, but right here we have the gritty underbelly of our society, corruption and greed and fear campaigns, and it's all fiercely political, and I think that's something that resonates with the story even to this day.

When I think of this book, I think I'll always have the distinct memory of the time and place where I read it. I bought it in Melbourne, in a sci-fi/fantasy/comic book, all round nerd shop in the city and I read it on the plane home. The whole lot. I've only read whole books like this twice, and the other time was for another book I'm very fond of, Dorothy Porter's verse novel, the Monkey's Mask. This book is utterly captivating.

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10 A Boot Stomping 20 A Human Face 30 Goto 10 - Jess Gulbranson

I also got this book on my travellings in Melbourne. It's the first book I've bought from LegumeMan Books, and I found a number of their titles in a quaint little cult bookshop called PolyEster Books. I'd heard a little about this, mainly that it was a really weird novel, and so I bought it.

I read it towards the start of February, a quick read, very violent and self-destructive and so strange. I can't remember a whole lot about it aside from bringing music legends back to life, conspiracies that I think somehow involved a group of autistic children, and I'm afraid I understand very little of it. I think at some point I'd have to go back and re-read it to recall what was going on, because really, the narrator was thrown into a situation far stranger than the previous one at every opportunity, and when things started making sense and he was beginning to gain a level of control and understanding, that went right out the window.

It's a great chaotic read. I've got high hopes for Gulbranson, and for LegumeMan Books, which I don't thing I mentioned are based in Melbourne, so hooray for having a decent cult/niche publisher in Australia. I'm probably going to be holidaying in Melbourne again later on in the year, so I'm thinking I'll take the opportunity to duck back down to PolyEster and grab another LegumeMan title. I've currently got my eye on a book called Should Have Killed the Kid. From what I've heard it's set in post-apocalyptic Melbourne. And Melbourne is just great. :)

Bucket of Face

2011-03-14T22:14:00.000+08:00

I read this book towards the end of January, and I've read a lot of stuff since then, so I'm not 100% crystal clear on what I thought of this book when I read it, but it did leave a good impression. And considering this is part of the New Bizarro Author Series, I sort of feel obliged to have my little say on it and encourage more people to give it a read.

So, where to start...

Bucket of Face follows the story of an innocent bystander to a Mafia deal gone wrong, and the turn of events change his life forever. That aspect of the story seems pretty reasonable, right?

Well, I should probably mention the mobsters are a banana and an apple, and the merchandise they're dealing with are faces.

Ok, I'm just going to let that sink in.

Got it?

Right, well the protagonist, the 'everyman' donut shop employee has these two dead fruits, a briefcase of cash and a bucket of faces in his posession. He takes this as an opportunity to start a new life with his kiwi fruit girlfriend, go somewhere exotic where he never has to work in a donut shop again.

It's all set up for a cracking bizarro mafioso story. I'm sure you're still wondering about the apple and banana mobsters. And the kiwi fruit girlfriend? I will get to it soon. You see, Bucket of Face is not your average bizarro mafioso story. It's brilliant and clever, it's such a well thought out story. The hitman sent after the protagonist is a tomato obsessed with Michael Jackson.

It works like all good bizarro should. It sounds random and incoherent, weird elements tossed in to make things entertaining. It's not until you get sucked into the story, the seemingly weird-for-the-sake-of-weird story, when you get these plot points that take the story to the next level. Something so strange as fruit-people, you'll find actually makes perfect sense. The bucket of faces? Well, yeah, of course. It's got a charming central plot line that blows out of proportion, that is quirky and humorous, and then you know it was thought out in much greater detail than you first guessed. And it's not spelled out for you. It's clever. It's funny. It's entertaining and it's well written.

Get it, read it, love it.

Muscle Memory

2011-02-24T14:24:00.000+08:00

It's getting close to the end of February and I'm still trying to wrap up the books I read in January. Three to go. Three marvellous, entertaining, and wonderfully written books. These are the three new bizarro author series books that I read from the seven new books put out in this series in 2010. Muscle Memory, by Steve Lowe was the first.

The concept of this story is simple enough to grasp: a bunch of people wake up to find they switched bodies in the night and they need to figure out what the fuck is going on. It's your standard Freaky Friday shit, pretty much.

Ok, so Steve Lowe isn't the next Shakespeare or James Joyce or whatever, but what he has in this tiny little book, is, pure and simple, an entertaining story. He takes the body switching concept and makes it his own. Firstly, the main character wakes up in his wife's body and finds out that he died some time in the night. Which means that his wife is dead. Yes?

I think that's how it worked out. Insert some government conspiracy and alien shit in there and you got Muscle Memory. It's a funny book. And not the sort of funny where it comes out as forced humour. It's sort of like, this book keeps getting stranger and stranger, and without giving too much away, the body switches are well thought out such that sometimes you don't know whether to cringe from the awkwardness or laugh.

I thought this was a great read, certainly a decent introduction to the new bizarro author series, as Lowe focusses on telling his story, and telling it well. The thing that really holds this book strong is that the crux of the novel, the body switching concept is entirely unoriginal, it's old, yet it works anyway. Steve Lowe nods to the fact that he's working with recycled concepts early on in the book, and then he just leaves them behind. It's a body swapping novel, but the difference is that it's Steve Lowe's body switching novel and he's made it his own.

My next book review will be Eric Hendrixson's Bucket of Face. And in amongst my "to read" pile, which I'm trying to keep trimmed down, is Lowe's second short novel, Wolves Dressed as Men, which I'm quite looking forward to. Hopefully between now and then I'll have caught up a bit on a few more reviews, but with uni starting soon, it may be a bit of a struggle. Although with uni starting soon I will probably be reading less.

Night of the Assholes

2011-02-21T23:23:00.000+08:00

Kevin L. Donihe's Night of the Assholes is classic bizarro fiction. Kevin L. Donihe's Night of the Assholes is clever and entertaining. Kevin L. Donihe's Night of the Assholes is quaint and charming.

Yeah, with a title like that, you may not conjure up those thoughts, and I think perhaps I am stretching things, but this is the third book of Donihe's I've read, and the second novel, and by now, I'm sure he knows what he's doing.

Donihe is one of those guys who (to me, at least) writes to tell a good story. Now, I must say, my favourite authors are usually the ones who try to do things a bit differently, to push some boundaries, to challenge the norm. And while bizarro certainly pushes boundaries in terms of content, I find it doesn't always push boundaries in terms of style. Guys like D. Harlan Wilson and Carlton Mellick III (flick back to my past couple of reviews), and even some of the up and coming bizarros in the New Bizarro Author Series had some literary style flying about the place. The danger of this is that it can be hit and miss, and while I'm yet to read Donihe's earliest books or weirdest books (I'm keen on getting a copy of House of Houses at some point in time...), I'm convinced that Donihe has found his little notch in the bizzaro genre and is quite happy there.

I guess I should probably talk a bit about the book. Now, after reading Mellick's Zombies and Shit, I had kind of worked myself into the zombie mindframe to read this book. I'll admit (as much as I've admitted various intertextual references in the past) that I'm quite unfamiliar with Night of the Living Dead. I don't watch many movies, let alone many horror movies, let alone many zombie cult horror movies. So, launching off a narrowed perspective here, I can say that for me, what makes this book work is not the references to zombie culture, it's not the Night of the Living Dead parody that seems to be at play here, or the mad-libbed assholes. In fact, this book could (in the wrong hands) have turned into a hideous pop culture spoof-fest that is essentially a hollowed out joke book pretentiously pretending to be a novel.

What makes this book work is the lead protagonist. Pure and simple. The support cast isn't too bad. It's refreshing to find yourself in a well-thought-out story, especially when people seem focussed on churning out mindless (hullooooo zombies....) parodies to suckle up to the cash cow. In this age of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Pirates and Ninjas and Super Fucking Mega Space Monsters, it's fantastic to see that Kevin L. Donihe knows how to tell a good story. Yes, it's a story as much as it's a parody.

Oh yeah, it's a book about an asshole epidemic, where everyone everywhere turns into assholes! It sounds pretty fucking cool, but if ever Donihe went through a phase of writing fanfiction, there is no trace of it at all here. Which is more than I can say for other parodies involving "what if we do x story, but instead of y we have z!" or "let's do x story, but add y to the story!!!!"

I think I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but really, I feel like the point needs hammering home. Donihe wrote a damn fine book about zombi- uhhh assholes, and while the title assumes the role of parody, the novel doesn't feel "gimmicky" or "tacked on", which I believe is no mean feat. Washer Mouth was a great book too.

The Egg Man

2011-02-18T19:42:00.000+08:00

I would have to say that the Egg Man, by Carlton Mellick III, is one of my favourite reads of his thus far. With all the sick shit he's put out over the years, I've now read... seven Mellick books. He does some awesome, weird, disturbing, sexual, juvenile shit, and while you expect a bit of all of the above, there's something else to his books (well, his stronger novels, at least) that keeps us limping back. Now, it all whittles down to one question people should ask more often: Why?

Why read this book over his other titles? Why choose this author over other authors? Why choose this genre, when you know it will fuck with you every single time and offer no sympathy afterwards.

Here's why I like the Egg Man so: It's dark and disturbing and quirky. It's compellingly twisted. It's rank and fetid and sexual. It's about instincts and taboos and nature and culture. It's about dystopia. It's about obsession. It's about fragile things and things that are too large to conceptualise. But really, it's a book about a guy who paints with his nose and a dirty, smelly chick and a guy with a massive brain.

As with other Mellick books, it's dark and surreal, and goes places you don't really want to go. But it's got a gothic beauty about it. There are politics at play that stir up something wonderful in my mind. And the world Mellick creates for his festering creatures to exist in is so brutal, yet so creative and strangely wonderful, it's so easy to just lose yourself in it and smother yourself with its people. It's a feast for the senses. It's a book that flowers in your imagination and touches on concepts of perspective and being that are so foreign it feels like the only way to attach yourself to Mellick's world is to completely detach yourself from this one.

And I think Mellick, himself, considers this his best work (or at least, one of his best). Well, Mr. Mellick, you sure know when you've hit the mark. The Egg Man is a cult masterpiece that is impossible to accurately describe. it's just nothing like anything I've read before.

Peckinpah

2011-02-17T19:33:00.001+08:00

It's been a while since I've posted a book review, and I've been doing a lot of reading over that period, so I've got a lot of stuff to catch up on. I'm tossing up whether to belt out a heap of short reviews or to pick the books I most want to talk about, or whether to keep pushing through the list.

Well, at least at the moment, I think I'm reading more books than I'm buying. I'm still buying a lot of books (I've got five on order at the moment), but I'm getting through the new books while also chipping away at a few that have been sitting on my shelf all too long.

So anyway, the last book that I read that I haven't reviewed yet is D. Harlan Wilson's Peckinpah.

I read Wilson's Blankety Blank right at the start of the year, and instantly found myself drawn to the writing. Now, I've got a few notes worth mentioning here; that I don't watch as many films as I'd like to, and the films of Sam Peckinpah (where the title of this book came from) have eluded me thus far. The symbolic significance of the title, to me, is fleeting. In comparison to Blankety Blank, I think Peckinpah is of similar substance; comical violence, a radical aggression towards suburbia, and chapters shaped in the form of microfictive snapshots (I'm hesitant to use the term "vignette" as my understanding of the word is somewhat vague at the moment), however, I personally prefer Blankety Blank over Peckinpah. Perhaps it's an issue of substance. But I am by no means saying that this is a bad book.

Each page is brimming with Wilson's strange (quite alien) brilliance. I'm wishing I wrote the review for this while the image were still fresh in my mind. Right now, all I can do is thumb through the book and try to remember what that initial reading was like. Peckinpah is subtitled "an ultraviolent romance", and while the book is brimming with ultraviolence, Wilson seems to tackle images of shock violence, blood and gore, with a sort of whimsical nonchalance. As with A Clockwork Orange, the ultraviolence in Peckinpah is extreme. However, A Clockwork Orange shocks its audience, whereas Peckinpah humours it.

I think the key to getting the most out of this book is just to let go of any expectations you may have for it. It's violent and absurd and punchy as fuck. Where else are you going to find a book where characters rip pigs in half just for kicks? And I'm sitting here and looking at the title, and I'm thinking, the only romance that occurs in this book that I can grasp at, would be between the author and Peckinpah. The book is littered with references to filmic techniques. At moments it seems like Wilson has forgotten about a plot and just decided to toss the reader in a completely different direction.

Some people may find this style frustrating. If you flick through the book, it looks like a total clusterfuck. There's one chapter in there that just says "pigshit". But that is precisely why I think D. Harlan Wilson is the shit. It looks like the book is just thrown together while on some sort of drunken bender, but when you sink right into the core of it, you're actually inside a densely constructed chaos. The madness is doing something to you, it's getting inside your head. It's unsettling you. It's making you question what the fuck is going on and why, but it's not hinting at any sort of answer. It's making you laugh at something that's not traditionally considered "humour".

It's wild and sporadic and violent and funny. It's genius. Next up on my D. Harlan Wilson reading list is Dr. Identity, and next up on my reviewing list is The Egg Man, by Carlton Mellick III.

Fistful of Feet (review)

2011-01-18T13:45:00.000+08:00

Fistful of Feet, by Jordan Krall

I've read a considerable amount a bizarro considering I only really started reading bizarro a couple of months ago. The more I read of particular authors, the more I get used to their style. Carlton Mellick III is certainly the most prolific writer in the genre (belting out new books left, right, and centre), but with those authors who've only got a few titles here and there, it's difficult to figure out exactly what they contribute to the genre until you read more.

Jordan Krall's Squid Pulp Blues was one of the first bizarro books I read (along with Mellick's Satan Burger and Cameron Pierce's Lost in Cat Brain Land). Now, I think what makes a good bizarro book is when the author tries to do something different, as opposed to tries to do something weird. Unique, as opposed to random. Squid Pulp Blues is a collection of three novellas, each connected through one crime-filled town. It's a weird, weird book, it's a no holds barred bizarro adventure, but it borrows stylistically from the noir genre. Fistful of Feet, evidently, continues on Krall's genre take on bizarro through its implementing of the western genre.

This is Krall's third published book and first full length novel, and I think as he progresses, his talent to tell a good story becomes just that extra bit better. I haven't read his first publication, Peacemeal June, which, from what I gather, is not so much a weird genre story, but a straight up bizarro story. I have, however, read his fourth published book, King Scratch, which was actually the first book he wrote. It's sort of like a predecessor to Squid Pulp Blues in its crime noir style, but I believe it's more for hardcore horror fans, as it takes precedence of fucked up shit over plot development. Which I guess brings me to Fistful of Feet.

It's a "weird western". That's a title that sums it up perfectly. It's a pretty wild novel, set in the town of Screwhorse, and follows Calamaro, a few other out-of-towners, and the townsfolk as frictions rise as crooks and cowboys and Indians draw themselves towards a chaotic, bloody mess. The local whorehouse specialises in some pretty weird fetishes, and while the simple townsfolk try to stand around and look innocent, they are anything but. Once this story gets going (and it gets going pretty early on), things quickly get out of hand, and stay that way for the majority of the book. At some points I just wanted the pace to slow down to build up a bit of tension, but this book is one of wild extremities. A lot of sex, a lot of violence, a lot of people getting what's coming to them.

As with Squid Pulp Blues, the narrative style of Fistful of Feet is one of disjointed, simultaneous plot lines. So while the plot runs linear, Krall is constantly switching between seemingly unconnected stories as they wind themselves towards eachother. The way certain plot points are foreshadowed in this book is probably my favourite part about it. Where certain characters or plots may seem to have dropped away to nothing, they're sitting dormant until the right time to make their dramatic entrance. It's not an easy thing to do with this style of narrative storytelling, but Krall pulls it off brilliantly. There were some points that I felt should have been pushed further in the book, such as the plot with the gold. It comes down to a matter of personal taste. I would have liked more suspense, and perhaps a closer correlation between the intersecting plot lines. But it's a great, weird, disturbing bizarro genre read, and I think Krall is becoming more ambitious with each book. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

Zombies and Shit (review)

2011-01-17T12:40:00.000+08:00

Zombies and Shit, by Carlton Mellick III

I don't really know where to start with this book. I was really looking forward to it. I'm not a huge zombie fan, and while I love a good horror book, I don't really read all that much horror. But as far as horror goes, this is like those horror movies that are ridiculously over the top, they're not scary, just disturbingly funny.

So, what is this book about? It's about a group of lowlife shitkickers and gutter punks who are dumped in a zombie infested wasteland to participate in a reality tv show called 'Zombie Survival'. It's pretty full on, with 20 participants featured as main characters, plus minor characters, plus detailed backstories.

I think what really separates this book from all the other zombie books around is the characters and backstories. Mellick has built up a corrupt post-apocalypse world where the majority of the world's population lives on an island called Neo New York. It's divided into four quadrants; Platinum, Gold, Silver and Copper. And that's pretty much how class is divided in the city. The show takes its contestants from copper and uses them to entertain the citizens of the other quadrants. This season of the show, however, contains contestants that are far more interesting than past seasons, with mercenary punks, androids and immortal lizard/humanoid creatures. Even the average contestants show a determination that exceeds expectations.

The concept is fascinating, and the action is brutally entertaining. And the stories that unfold are genuinely thought-provoking. From this book comes issues of race, class and corruption. Why save the world, when the guys in control have their every need catered for. There were parts in the book where I wanted to stop reading, or to just skip over them (I'll just skim over Gogo's story...) due to the graphic fetishised nature the story had adopted. But I guess that sort of stuff just works as a reminder that this book is a zombie book, and it's fucking hardcore. So I think a lot of people who don't read much horror/bizarro would probably cower away from this book, if you can trek your way through the disturbing parts, it's well worth the read. It's what you'd expect from a book called 'Zombies and Shit', but it's got that something else to it that is tragically sad, that the plight of humankind in the event of disaster is inherently futile. Carlton Mellick III certainly knows how to shock, but he also knows how to twist a seemingly self-indulgent story towards larger themes.

Starfish Girl (review)

2011-01-12T10:38:00.000+08:00

Starfish Girl - Athena Villaverde

"So cute!" This novel(la) is Villaverde's first publication, and it follows the story of Ohime, the starfish girl, as she wanders joyfully through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of a corrupt and violent underwater civilisation. In her travels, she meets Timbre, who is a no-holds-barred sea-anemone assassin. She doesn't like to fuck around. Together they travel through the dangerous lands of their dome society in an attempt to reach a ship that will take them to the surface to restart civilisation on land.

This book is great for a first novel. It's a fun adventure with some great action sequences and some clever and interesting plot points. The style is gothic bizarro. It's not as fucked up as some of the other books I've read, but it's got a dash of shocking here and there.

Now, I read a while ago that Carlton Mellick III mentored her throughout the process of writing this book. After actually reading this book, I can tell. I've read six (well, five and a half, at the moment) of his books, but it's not until now, that I've read Starfish Girl and I'm reading Zombies and Shit at the moment that I've noticed the influence. I'm not talking about content-wise, as Athena seems to have her own stylised world building and characterisation down no problem, but her tendancy to transition to backstories on a regular basis is something that Mellick does a lot. And I must say that it's quite an effective story-building technique (considering I haven't picked up on it until now).

This, I think, is where the novel comes into full form. The characters and the landscape are richly detailed and entertaining, and while the narrative runs in a conventional, linear direction (beginning to end), there is still the impression of dense storytelling through the use of backstories placed in key points throughout the book.

I really enjoyed the book. I read it in one day (and that was taking my time, too), and I must say that I'll be looking for more from this author over the coming years. It's stylistic, it's fun, it's a lovely bizarro book, and it's got a playfully innocent exhubrance similar to Kevin L. Donihe's Washer Mouth. If you've never read bizarro before and you'd like to give it a sample, this book is a great start. It's got a couple of shocking parts, but for the most part, it's surreal and beautiful and gothic, it's captivating and charming, it's short but sweet.

Blankety Blank (review)

2011-01-09T18:27:00.000+08:00

Oh my god this is now in my top ten favourite books of all time. Maybe even top five. Yes, get ready for a chunk of text dedicated to why I think this book is so damn good.

Blankety Blank, by D. Harlan Wilson

Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria is the thinking man's bizarro. It's sharp, it's intelligent, it's weird. It's a very well thought out and well written book. Damn, this book is good.

Ok, so here's how it goes:
Mr Van Trout is an asshole. He's a pretty big asshole, as a matter of fact. He has a massive silo in his front yard because he's better than everyone else. 'Vulgaria' is Wilson's construction of a dystopian suburbia. There's the neighbourhood families, the dinner parties, the kids playing in the front yard, yet most of the characters are obsessively selfish. Mr Van Trout is driven by materialism. His silo is a landmark of his success that he has to rub in to all his neighbours. There are obsessive bodybuilders, powerless superheroes, and couples obsessed with fitting into the social circle that is the vulgaria of Grand Rapids. Then Mr Blankety Blank comes on the scene. He's a serial killer with a barbershop pole for a head, and he's a true splatterpunk serial killer.

But forget about that for now. Yeah, it's a pretty absurd plot, and it is highly captivating, but you don't read this book for the plot. As with most books I like, it's the style that gets me. I love a book that's got a lot of style to it. I love seeing an author doing things differently, structuring things differently. To me, that's what makes this book. It's a fictional memoir. It reads very matter-of-factly, and it often runs off on tangents that are not so much part of the plot, but part of the setting, the vulgaria. Throughout the book there are short articles on things such as a brief history of werewolves, or a brief history of ripperology, or a brief history of silos. It sounds pretty boring, but the blatant falsehoods make this book what it is. They all work in some form or another to compliment the greater product that is the memoir. The novel goes from chapter to chapter, capturing the vital information. The dinner party where so-and-so weren't invited, or Rutger Van Trout building his silo or buying a new car, or the recent wave of serial killings and cryptic-yet-meaningless clues from the Mr Blankety Blank.

This book is brimming with its own histories it feels like there is so much more to this book than the hundred-and-something pages. They watch television differently. They watch irreality programs. They throw parties differently. They treat their children differently. They are the product of a different time and place that seems like it's a reflection of our own time and our own place. They become obsessed over their own self importance and their own intelligence. Rutger Van Trout's son is named Rutger Van Trout. One family named their daughter Sheba. They also named their dog Sheba. Some characters go by several names and personas. It feels like this book is on the brink of becoming horrifically confusing, but even where there's passages of dialogue where no distinct speaker is identified, the book still reads with a crystal clarity. Everything lends itself to some idea or concept, lends itself to adding context to the plot, lends itself to this or that or the other.

It's a social catastrophe of self-importance and assholery. I can't really say I noticed a difinitive protagonist throughout the whole book. The parents are assholes. The kids are little scumbags. Even in the presence of a brutal serial killer, it seems the biggest problems the characters have is one of a mild identity chrisis. Wilson has set this memoir up perfectly. It's like, what we'd be like if we were compelled entirely by our own greed and selfishness and our own egos. I guess you could extrapolate any number of concealed morals or meanings to this story, especially since its ending doesn't resolve very much at all, but I think I like the idea that Wilson was critiquing suburban culture and their over-emphasis on materialist needs and social status.

It's a fantastic, weird, brutally dysfunctional read. It's not for all readers, but it's definitely more than its synopsis. It's more than the weird false-factoids and surrealism. It's a top quality cult book that packs a punch quite like Fight Club or A Clockwork Orange or Less Than Zero.

Restaurant at the End of the Universe (review)

2011-01-08T23:10:00.000+08:00

At some point this year I plan to write about something that's not a review, but for now, here's another book I've recently read, and something I can freely rant about.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams

Sometimes you get books that are popular that are one of those iconic novels that people rant and rave about like it's the best thing ever. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is kind of like this. And while I feel bad ripping on books that get a lot of people reading (especially when the author isn't around to defend himself), that is the case this time around.

For those that don't know, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is the second book in Adams' five part sci-fi comedy series, of which 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is the first part and the most familiar. I read the first book some time last year. I'd seen the 2005 film adaptation some years before and I quite enjoyed it. So I bought the first book and read it in a couple days and I quite enjoyed it. So I bought the second book and started it and fell flat. And I tried a few times since then, each time only getting a few pages in before asking "why bother?" and failing to come up with a compelling answer. I think it's the same sort of thing that stopped me about half way through the Great Gatsby and about 20-30 pages in to the Catcher in the Rye. Both supposed classics, both books that people love to death and tell me that I too should love.

But I committed myself to giving this book another chance, as I hope to give another chance to Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye at some point this year. You could argue that I've got the mindset stuck in me that I'm not going to enjoy this book, but for the amount of times I've tried and the book has failed to impress me, I think I've got grounds to base my opinions upon. Sure, I may have built up a bit of a grudge for the book, but all things aside, I finished the book in about a week, I think. It's a short book, but that first part took some real chewing on, to make it past the barrier of not giving up.

I guess I should talk some positives on the book, so as to not completely write it off as a book to avoid at all costs. It's got a playful exhuberance to it, a humour and strange logic to it that is very much in the same vein of Alice in Wonderland. The title " The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (aka: Alice in Wonderland in Space)" would not entirely be out of place. I'd probably enjoy it more if I didn't read so much weird books already. Weirder and more abrasive. Because I like my books to have a bit of grit, a bit of punch, a bit of edge to them. This book is something the child in me would love to read. I mean, I did read the first book before my weird fiction collection got too wild.

Another thing I like about this book is that it's got some interesting ideas going on. It's got its clever-yet-absurd twisted space logic going on, it's got moments of really well thought out ideas that seem to click together quite well. But I get the feeling that these ideas are too compressed, too thinly veiled to gather any momentum, and here is where I feel the book falls into its first major pitfall. It's a fast paced sci-fi absurdist adventure, yet it bounces from plot point to plot point with a nonchalance that is simply frustrating. Why do I care that these characters are currently hurling towards a sun in a(nother) stolen spaceship? Oh wait, I don't. And when Adams tries to explain some of his ideas, he structures them in the most awkward and clunky ways that not only is their meaning lost, but it reads really awkward. The prose is so inconsistent that the wit is often lost to boring and poorly phrased chunks of texts. It's like it's been left up to the reader to turn a blind eye to those numerous instances and skimming through the book as a light afternoon read.

I guess that's all the book really is. Something you just read to switch the brain off and coast along on the strange and surreal imagery. Sure, it'd work a lot better if the prose were fixed up a bit, but it's not a serious book. It's just something you read for some light-hearted fun.

And now I'm posed with a serious conundrum. Do I buy the third book now? For those of you who have read the series, is the next book any better, or is it more or less the same sort of thing?

The Flappy Parts (review)

2011-01-07T17:12:00.000+08:00

Ok, so this year, I might try to unclutter things a bit by keeping general housekeeping blogs separate from review blogs from more specific writing blogs. So while I've already got an abundance of things planned/happening in 2011, there's time to flap my mouth-hole about that stuff later.

Right now is all about reviews. And specifically, a review of a particular book. The first book I read this year, Kevin L. Donihe's "The Flappy Parts." I've also read Douglas Adam's "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", so hopefully I'll have a review for that book up soon too. I think I've set 2011 up to be a year for excessive reading. And probably excessive writing too.

So anyway, on to the flappy parts.

Over the past year or so, I've grown quite keen on poetry as an art form. However, something that's been holding me back from reading more poetry is that the really good stuff is usually quite sparse. Of course, it comes down to personal taste, so I suppose I should clarify where I stand on that matter.

I like stuff that's weird, smart, different, thought provoking, challenging, original. Basically, if you do something different with your poetry, I'll probably like it. And for the record, I like this book. As far as poetry goes, my personal tastes don't stretch too far. I've read a couple of verse novels by Dorothy Porter, and the characterised poems in Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk are my sort of thing. Efficient word usage, nice and punchy, yet uses the form of the poem to their advantage.

The Flappy Parts isn't all poetry. Almost everything is under a page long, but some pieces are more prose poems or flash fiction. It's a bit of a fine-line distinction, but I consider myself a fan of the flash fiction genre, and while it can work on similar principles to poetry, it is an entirely different form.

So in this book, we have a collection of poems and flash fiction totalling a bit over 110 pages. It's a small book, but it's got a lot of material here. I think I recall reading somewhere that this book is Donihe's collections of poetry over the past decade. Now, in terms of structure, I think Donihe's got a firm grasp of the poetic form, and he's adopted some interesting poetic techniques to add some depth to his work. No doubt I'll go back and read this again, to pick up on things I didn't get the first time around, and to try to figure out more of what the poetry means, if anything at all.

As with the bizarro genre, Donihe's poetry is awkward and weird and at times disturbing, and at times just completely jarring. The material in this book. It's been a few days since I read the book and there's not too much that's still fresh in my mind. I suppose I can blame my erratic reading habits for this, as I've finished reading one book and read about half of another book since then, so I feel like I haven't properly digested this work. Call that lazy reviewing if you like, I'm gonna call it a medium close up shot review. I get a good impression of what the book is about. Most of the poetry is good. Some of the poetry is really good. I can't remember reading anything I outright hated, but to be a human being, there are some poems that aren't as good as others. Medium close up shot. I can't tell you exactly which poems were my favourite because I didn't look that close (like the extreme close up shot where you can count the eyelashes) and I can't really give you a thorough detailing of the impression of the whole book because I haven't stepped back to see how the poems compliment eachother (landscape shot, where you can see the surroundings, the composition of the shot).

So, yeah, it'd probably do the book justice for me to read it again, and at some point, I am positive I will, but for now, there's just this (which I believe is still quite a passable review). I loved Donihe's novel, Washer Mouth, but his poetry has proved to me that he's not just your average weird author. He's a wordsmith. A flash fiction freak. A poet. And he knows how to get you thinking. I feel this book would be best read by those with a keen eye for poetry, and consumed and savoured on a poem-by-poem basis. There's a lot of great material here, it feels like somewhat of a shame to reduce all this poetry into one short volume. I read it in a single afternoon, and I think this book has so much more to offer than that.

P.S: Don't lick the page.

Summing up the year and three more reviews

2010-12-30T23:12:00.000+08:00

What have I accomplished this year? Well... I had a disappointing fragment from a short story published in a student magazine that, given the opportunity, I'd probably remove, although I'm sure no one even noticed it in the first place. Now, I guess I sound like I'm being an ungrateful shit, and I know at one point, I would have thought, a publication's a publication, that's an accomplishment in itself. I guess from last year I've made more of an endeavour to send my writing out to more magazines, to more competitions, I've just had no results that I'm actually proud of. I'm still waiting to hear back from a couple more things, but it's been a while and I have serious doubts as to whether they will go anywhere. I would probably say that I'm a writer who hates compromise, yet I love the challenge to be quirky and unusual and different. That's something I'm not sure your stock standard literary magazine caters for. However, I'm still waiting to get feedback on my latest reject from a couple of months ago, so I'm just guessing. But I think it feels better to think that I've been rejected based on personal tastes, rather than general incompetence/lack of talent, however bitter it is, still, to be rejected over matters as trivial as personal taste. But I guess I should just buck up and move on.

As this year comes to a close, I think I've got a lot to boast about in terms of my academic accomplishments. If I continue studying like I have this year, over the course of the next year and a half, I'll be right on target for graduating with honours a year after that. And the creative writing classes I've taken this year have really allowed me to open up my writing into media I wouldn't usually write in. In addition to the short stories I've written this year, I've written a small collection of poetry, toyed around with some theatre scripts, and fucked around with zines, spoken word poetry, novel writing, novella writing and the bones to a short film script. Some of my more ambitious projects will (hopefully) push onward into 2011, where the stuff I've completed will potentially work their way onto submission piles belonging to various magazines. And, of course, everything works as a learning curve. I'm always looking for new ideas, new perspectives, interesting new techniques and styles to mess about with and just create. I'll probably keep up the spoken word poetry here and there. The Perth Poetry Slam competition is on in February and I'll probably put my name down for that.

So I guess I've got a pretty clear picture for what I want 2011 to hold for me. First semester at uni should be a breeze. I know it's not ideal to adopt that mentality, but I'll be in my third year, and my first semester consists of two first year courses and two third year courses, one of the latter is external, so there'll be a lot of self-taught material, which I'm more than ok with. But on the same page, I'm also looking forward to plunging right into the heavy stuff in the second semester. I've got my creative writing supervised project then, as well as three other third year units. But I guess my two main goals for the year are to get my first book published and to make my film. Both are not easy tasks. I've been sitting on both ideas for a while now, and I've taken tentative steps forward with both of them. I've had a brief word with the publisher I'm looking to go with, and my next step there is coming up with a workable 25k word draft. The film is a little more involved. More collaborative, I mean. The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems, especially since I'm one of those people who likes to aim high and either produce something top quality, or not do anything at all. I often get caught half way between, so I guess that's not really an accurate depiction of my creative juices at play, more so a mentality than anything else.

But anyway, so many things, so easy to get bogged under. I'm glad that I've been able to read as much as I have over the past few months. I think over the past six months I've read about 23 books. Maybe more. Short books, but books, nonetheless. I've ordered a few more that should hopefully be arriving shortly into the new year, but for now I should probably catch up to date with my reviews.

Fishy Fleshed, by Carlton Mellick III:

I read this in a couple of days. By now, I've read a few of Carlton's books. I can see four on my bookshelf. This one grabbed me with the immediacy of Satan Burger. It's got a strong narrative style. It's narrated by a simple, yet complex minded individual. In a vastly different society in the future, a group of scientists try to go back in time to find Jesus. It's weird and crazy, and while I would use those two words to describe the last Mellick book I read (and probably most, if not all of his books), this book really comes into its own with its written style. The narrator is someone to really connect with. His illustrations are utterly incomprehensible, but it builds up a sense of otherworldliness that the main character is most definitely not in sync with our society. And he's not in sync with his society either. I would say that Mellick has crafted something genuinely unique and special with this book. It's not as crude or violent as some of his other books. It's still got that bizarro vulgarity to it, but it's a bit more... sophisticated. Like a bizarro sci-fi version of 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time'.

Shatnerquake, by Jeff Burk

This book, at about 80 pages, is a bit of an afternoon read. It's not ground breaking or thought provoking stuff. It's a fast paced action about William Shatner fighting a bunch of characters he's played. It's short, it's energetic, it's a fun read. There's not really much more I can say about it other than it's not a bad book. It's something you might read to kill an afternoon. It's got some really killer moments and the plot is unusual and compelling, and when I finished it, I wasn't sure if I wanted more or if I was all Shatnered out. But yes. It's an entertaining read.

Jack & Mr. Grin, by Andersen Prunty

This book took me a while to read. Considering it's only about 170 pages long, it took me a while to read. I think it was the cover that disturbed me most. It was either that or the fact that it's the first bizarro horror story I've read and I wasn't sure of what I was getting into. I should mention now that the cover on my book is different to the cover pictured. I was a little disappointed to be honest. But after I got into it I just felt even more disturbed. This Mr. Grin guy is one pretty sadistic son of a bitch. It took me a while to decide whether I liked this book or not.

It wasn't until I could see a feeble light towards the end of this dark and tortuous tunnel that I picked up my reading pace. I found that, yes, I did like this book. It was sick and twisted, sure, and it made me feel uncomfortable. But I think that sometimes that really makes a book work. Goosebumps is child's play, this stuff is not for the squeamish. It's also wild and surreal, yet oddly logical. And it didn't have a cop-out cliffhanger ending that a lot of horror books/films do, so I feel like Mr Prunty was offering me his heartfelt congratulations by the end of the book, and I felt that, despite the torment (well, mild discomfort) he put me through, I really quite enjoyed this book. It was a bit touch and go for a while, but when things got rollin, there was no turning back.

Sex and Death/King Scratch

2010-12-19T17:09:00.001+08:00

I've decided I'm not going to rant and rave in my book reviews as much as usual. These two books aren't at the top of my recommendation list. I've heard a number of times of people who are really into the bizarro genre that it can be a bit hit and miss. While I wouldn't go all out and say these are the worst books you can find in the genre, I guess I'll just go right ahead and say that I've read better. It's just a little unsatisfying that I read these two books one after another.

Sex and Death in Television Town:

A weird western. Hermaphrodite gunslingers. People with televisions for heads. A stegosauras woman assassin with fortune telling ejaculate. There are some parts of this story that I really like. The surreal scenery, the television people, the changing landscape, the colour mill. There are parts in this story that I would love to see extrapolated upon or described in more detail. Instead, I feel what could be a really interesting and entertaining story is brought about to senseless sex and violence (thus the title, admittedly well thought out, considering characterisations and plot), and so at times it feels like a casual romp of hedonistic extremities for the sake of extremities. It's graphic and violent and fast paced and fun, but I guess, hypothetically, I would have done quite a few things differently. Not a bad read, but I think Carlton Mellick has more to offer with titles such as Warrior Wolf Women or Punk Land.

King Scratch:

After reading Squid Pulp Blues, I thought, this author has a real knack for writing genre bizarro. Squidly crime noir that was fascinating and disturbing at the same time. King Scratch runs along the same vein, and the bare bones of the story are really good. A guy involved with running moonshine comes across a horrific secret that will tear him down in one short, brutal night. But (to me, at least) it lacked the style and pulp that made SPB so enjoyable. It's dark and disturbing and perverted, and I got to a point where it all seemed to skip like a broken record. It's overflowing with unnecessary body fluids that chunk up what could very well be a gripping story. It reads as though it's trying to pack as much sick shit into every page that it's leaving my desire for plot direction to go starving. It's disturbing and perverted for what feels like the sake of just being disturbing and perverted. I read it this afternoon, and upon finishing it, I felt that it would have been much more effective to strip back all the piss and shit and vomit and keep the weird squidly oddities specked about the place, but mostly keep the plot moving forward with a build up to a twist that is far more horrifying than body fluids streaming about the place at every opportunity. It felt like the plot twist (which was a genuinely shocking one) would have benefitted more if it hadn't been watered down by the previous stream of shocking events.

However, I'd hate for anyone to write these two authors or these two books off purely because of my comments here. They are both talented writers that I regard highly, and rest assured, I'll be reading more of their stuff as they continue on their writing careers. And, if you'd like to check out King Scratch for yourself, Jordan Krall has been kind enough to hand it out as a free download, which you can find here (temporarily, and for how long, I don't know): King Scratch

So, there, you can make up your own opinion. And yes, I feel like a prick for criticising a book I read for free (don't hate me Mr. Krall!)

And over the next few weeks, I'll hopefully be brainstorming for my own bizarro novella as well as reading titles such as; My Fake War, Fishy Fleshed, Starfish Girl, Blankety Blank, Zombies and Shit and the Flappy Parts. I'm particularly looking forward to the Flappy Parts, Kevin L. Donihe's poetry collection, as I have a soft spot for poetry, and I'd love to get at some weird, surreal shit.

Brainwashing

2010-12-15T21:41:00.001+08:00

Well, more brainstorming but, whatever.

I haven't written very much on the Pilgrim since I last updated. I think I've probably written less. I did six rewrites on chapter one before it felt right enough to continue to chapter two, and I've done three rewrites of chapter two that still don't feel quite right, but I think I'm getting there. And I think after the first complete draft is finished the first two chapters will just be one chapter. It happens. Right now, I'm not pushing the wordcount, but instead I'm doing what I probably should have done earlier. I've been brainstorming and fleshing out my ideas.

What I've been doing is writing within the laws of the bizarro world I've constructed, trying to make the plot fit in that way, but I feel I should be outlining the plot and then letting the laws run rampant. I've got my key bizarro elements down, and I've been working on extrapolating them to make the narrative wild and exciting, and I've been working on fleshing out the main characters, figuring out their purpose in the story, their personalities and actions/abailities, and I think I've got some really good ideas going.

At the moment what I need to work on is how I'm going to flesh the journey out and build it up, how I can keep it interesting and keep it really crackling along at an exciting pace. I'm having a week off work over christmas to go back home, and I'll be without a computer over that time, so I think it'll be good to just figure the bare bones of the plot out to the details on pen and paper so that I've got lots of fresh new ideas when I get back. I'll probably end up pushing self-enforced deadlines back further and further for the sake of quality, but at this rate, I'm going to aim for a finished first draft by the end of January and, hopefully, a more polished draft finished before uni goes back.

Now, obligatory blah blah about my own writing aside, here's another lovely review of a book I just read:

Washer Mouth: The Man Who Was A Washing Machine, by Kevin L. Donihe

A quick little side note before I get right into it: Mr Donihe is the editor for the Eraserhead Press' New Bizarro Author Series imprint, aka the guy I need to impress with the Pilgrim to get it published. So I figured it would be to my advantage to read some of this guy's work.

Washer Mouth is a story that looks like the sorts of books I would read in primary school. The concept is strange yet light-hearted, so I went into this book expecting a light, surreal, comical bizarro novel similar to the books I would read about intelligent cats or unfortunate toads. Of course, being bizarro, I knew it was going to be weirder than any of those children's books. However, I didn't quite expect those moments of dark, expicit sexual conflict or violence. It somewhat reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's all fun and games and good times and then holy fucking shit what is going on? A change of tone, a change of pace, a change of clothes, and I must say that reading this book feels somewhat like rolling about in a washing machine. It goes through cycles and spits me out. And I love it.

Donihe breathes life into every one of his characters, such that no two washing machines are the same and no two celebrities are the same. The protagonist, Roy, and the antagonist, the Dark Washer, are both childishly oblivious to the world, but Roy is propelled by his love for the soap opera, Sands of Eternity, where the Dark Washer is propelled by a fascination (and sexual attraction) towards violence and aggression. People react differently to these bizarre, alien characters, recently transformed from washing machine into human form, and the washing machines' character developments are, I believe, what makes this book so captivating.

Some may find it hard to know what goes on in a washing machine's mind, or what goes on in the mind of a man recently transformed from a washing machine, but Donihe pulls it off so well, I doubt I'll be able to look at washing machines the same again. It's a brilliant and entertaining read, and I'll definitely be picking up more of Donihe's work (I'm eager to check out his poetry collection just recently released). Clever, humorous, a dash of completely fucked up, this is a must read for all fans of the strange and surreal.

Now, if only I could shake the thought of hot dogs being made out of long part...

Behemoth/Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland

2010-12-09T22:48:00.000+08:00

I haven't done a lot of writing over the past week or so, mainly because I've been doing a lot of reading. The last two books I read I kind of just... devoured... in a matter of days. So I haven't got anything new on the writing front, but I've got a couple of reviews.

The first book was Scott Westerfeld's steampunk adventure, Behemoth.

It's the second book in his Leviathan trilogy, and, when I bought the book last week, I recieved a copy of the first book as a part of some promotional giveaway they had on the second book. So I've wound up with a second copy of the first book which I've already read.

Anyway, the last book in the trilogy is scheduled for late next year, so there's a bit of a wait until I can finish reading this thing. It's a bit of a bother because it's not so much three self contained novels that follow a sequence and a general overarching narrative (like, for example, I read the third Harry Potter book first and still managed to comprehend it properly), it's more like one large novel broken up into three parts where there's no chance in hell you should read the second book without having read the first.

Behemoth continues the narrative of Leviathan, which is set in an alternate history WWII where Alek, the only son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, flees the Germans long enough to see the war out and take his rightful place as the ruler of Austro-Hungary. His story intersects with Deryn, a girl posing as a boy to serve in the British air forces abourd the Leviathan Airship.

It's 480 pages long, but is quite a quick read considering. Large font, short chapters, and illustrations pad the book out nicely, but it is also scattered with quite a number of fast paced action sequences around all the war and political contexts. Now, when I say steampunk, and WWII, I should clarify that Westerfeld has taken many liberties to put his own spin on the steampunk genre. The allies are labelled "Darwinists" for using war machines fabricated out of living creatures (eg, the Leviathan airship is a giant hydrogen-breathing whale) where the Germans, Austrians and that mob are labelled "Clankers" for their mechanical inventions. So it's very much a battle of technologies, and it's quite interesting how they play out in the series, and particularly, in Behemoth.

Having said that, it's an entertaining book that the teenager in me thinks is totally awesome. It's got elements of teen/young adult fiction, with the plots of the two main characters, both are struggling with their identities, trying to retain secrets, while bearing the burden of the loss of their parents. And then there's the whole, you know, war thing. It's got lots of adrenaline. If you like steampunk, or if you like reading about teenagers trying to come to grips with their identity, I'd say, it's well worth the read. But if you're after something more sophisticated and mature, you won't find that here. Hopefully I'll have a review for Cherie Priest's steampunk novel, Dreadnought, shortly. I sense that she tends to handle the genre with a bit more poise.

Anyway, the second book I finished this week was Carlton Mellick III's Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland.

Yeah. No typos there, that's the title of an actual, physical, published book. I'd say the same thing about this one in regards to it being a quick read. Large font and illustrations and lots of action. This time, the author did the illustrations himself. And a number of them resemble nightmarishly hideous furry porn.

And if that hasn't sold you on this book, wait till you hear about the chainsaw wielding mutants! Yes, this book has pure liquid fucking awesome dripping from every page. If it were made into a film I'd want Peter Jackson to direct it because, quite simply, it is completely bizarre and completely epic at the same time.

The book is set in an apocalyptic future in one of the last few remaining civilisations on Earth. The city is called "McDonaldland" and is run by total assholes. It's got the totalitarian vibe of Punk Land with a beefy injection of hyper-consumerism on the side. And you get fries with that.

In this society, sex turns women into wolves. And the food turns men into mutants. To uphold the image of perfection, all wolves and mutants are tossed outside the city's 300 foot tall steel wall and turned loose to fend for themselves.

Despite being a fast paced bizarro clusterfuck of sex and violence, this story pays close attention to character development, and sculpts the plot carefully around that. I'd love to get even a brief glimpse into Mellick's brain, because, quite simply, this colossal rampage of a novel, in all its oddities and its twisted logic, is surprisingly touching. Like a good narrative should, there isn't a single character in Warrior Wolf Women that I don't love. The novel resonates through all the disturbing shit with much thought spent towards the ideals of family, freedom, sacrifice, and yes, even love.

Even if bizarro is not your cup of tea, the sick shit isn't entirely overflowing from this book, and while it is one of the weirdest books you may read, it's definitely worth it.

And hopefully, I'll have a few more bizarro books arriving in the mail soon, so even if I don't have a whole lot of new writing to talk about, at least I should have some tasty, quirky reviews.

The Novella Challenge + Squidly Review

2010-12-02T12:35:00.000+08:00

So, now that NaNoWriMo is over I'm working on my novella and the plan is to do it by the end of December. The target is 25,000 words. Not too difficult, and at the end, I plan on having a decent quality story out of it.

At the moment it's been very stop and start. Write. Pause. Rewind. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. I've rewritten the opening scene so many times it's not funny. But each time it's getting better and better, and that's definitely going to help with setting the scene later down the track. It's like a living, breathing organism. Feed it and it will grow.

The plan is to work chapter by chapter. I've got an outline of events/chapters in place, I just need to execute them. I'm also hoping to wrangle a few writer friends into reading it chapter by chapter to see what they think before I go back and edit and send it to the publishers. Yeah, it's a big goal, but I think I need to take big steps like this if I want to eventually get somewhere with my writing.

Anyway, onto the squidly review:

Squid Pulp Blues, by Jordan Krall.

This book consists of three novellas, each are roughly 60 pages in length, and each of them set in the strange town of Thompson. Without going into too much detail, I'll say that each story sort of interconnects with the next, from the Little Bing Bong comics to the disfigured war veterans known as "the longheads" to the midget prostitutes to the many many squid related objects. Ashtrays, drugs, drinks, and even entire living squids.

You can probably gather from the title and cover that it's a squidly bizarro pulp-ish crime/noir book that is weird and dark and gritty and violent and brimming with style. That's a pretty accurate portrayal, really. And I must say that I love, love, love Jordan Krall's style. There's the distinct impression of multiple intersecting storylines, like of a series of short stories converging at one climactic point. Each of the three stories occur like this. There's something. Then something unrelated, and something else unrelated, and they work their way in to the dark and disturbing focal point. It's like if Quentin Tarantino were a surreal author this is the sort of thing he'd write.

Yeah, it's three stories that work independently of each other, but really, you need to read them all in series to get the full impression of what Krall has accomplished here. It's brilliant. And I'd love to get my hands on his other books and devour their squidly goodness. This man makes his mark giving the bizarro genre his own patented style. If you like noir and you like pulp then you'll love this. I don't even think you need to be a fan of the bizarro genre to enjoy this. It's weird, but in its own universe, it runs so squidly smooth and picks up the pace early on and packs a squidly punch that's so strange and disturbing I found it impossible not to love this book.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Thirty

2010-11-30T10:26:00.000+08:00

So this is it, done with another year. Once I hit 50k I couldn't be bothered writing any more. Which kind of sucks, but, eh, I kind of got bored of the pointlessness of my novel. I don't think I'll be finishing it any time soon.

At the moment I'm trying to write a novella that has spawned from some of the ideas from within the novel. The Pilgrim is a story that is constantly changing each time I go to work on it. It probably won't even be called The Pilgrim for much longer. Anyway, it's about a teenager who is orphaned when a gang of Deaths come and murder his parents. He takes to the streets, hiding from the legions of Deaths that fester about the towns, and with his pet spider, Stinky, and his television, Telly, he searches for the last remaining humans and a means to overcome Death.

And while I'm here, I'll drop a couple of reviews for the latest books I've read: Punk Land, and Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden.

Punk Land, by Carlton Mellick III:

I really enjoyed this story. It is awesome. It follows a mutated punk called Goblin, a couple of characters from Satan Burger and a Shark Girl ninja assassin as they try to overthrow the organisation that is trying to redefine the term "Punk" and dispose of all the people who fail to adhere to their standards, or who don't have enough "punk points". It's gritty, violent and entertaining, with political overtones running throughout. It's a step up from Satan Burger. It's still random as fuck, but it's a lot more cohesive and engaging.

If you've read Satan Burger, and you liked it, Punk Land definitely won't disappoint, but while it's a sequel, you probably don't need to have read Satan Burger to understand it. It couldn't hurt, but I don't think it's necessary.

Yeah, the book makes for a good read. It's pretty wicked, and the illustrations are quite fun too. It was a quick read for a 280 page book, but I feel that it by no means falls short on substance. It's fast paced from start to finish, and if you're a fan of the strange, violent, and at times, the sexual, if you're impartial to being grossed out now and again, you'll probably get a kick out of this book. It's got me excited for the next two books of his I've got on order: Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, and Sex & Death in Television Town.

Shark Hunting In Paradise Garden, by Cameron Pierce:

As with Mellick's Punk Land, this is the second book I've read of Pierce's. Although, this is the first book he's had published. Now, I don't mean to sound harsh, but you can tell it's his first book. It's wild and random and bizarre and strange, and with giant fucking flying sharks in the garden of eden? You can't really go wrong there. However, I felt like I wanted more out of it than just the strange descriptions that were each one more strange and outlandish than the page before. I loved his short story collection, his second publication, Lost in Cat Brain Land, and I think what is missing from this book is a sharpness of imagery. It's so strange it's hard to picture what everything must look like. I want to really get in there and check the place out, but once Pierce briefly describes one thing, he rushes off to describe another. I suppose you get that with a book that's only just over 100 pages long.

It was a good book, having said that. It's got a lot going on, and subverts a lot of expectations, it really messes with religion and the image of god and that sort of thing. It doesn't really cram any religious themes down your throat or anything, but it does rewrite the beginning of humankind in a really, really, really strange way. It's about a bunch of religious priests from the future, weird and demented and magical, who travel back in time to go shark hunting with Adam and Eve. What they find is a shit load of sharks and weird trees and robots and stuff. It's super messy hyperactive stuff, and while I did enjoy it, I hope Pierce's other works (I'm thinking of going for Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island next) are a bit more cohesive and well rounded.

If you like fast paced and weird books, maybe Douglas Adams knocked up a notch, you may enjoy this book. But I'd suggest checking out Lost in Cat Brain Land and making a decision from there.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Twenty Two

2010-11-22T14:04:00.001+08:00

Yesterday I hit 50,000 words. I've still got a long way to go in the novel, but I think I'll take it a bit easier over the next few days. Last night I started working out the story I want to write for Eraserhead Press' New Bizarro Author Series. I'm taking two characters from Comarama, The Pilgrim and his pet spider Stinky, and I've started writing a story about those two characters in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I picture it as sort of like a bizarro version of The Road, but I'm still working out how I want the plot to play out within this setting and with these characters. For the most part, I don't want it to be hilarious. I don't want it to be so strange it's funny. What I want is to be so strange yet through the story you grow attached to the pilgrim. I want you to read it and find yourself attached to a man whose best friend is his pet spider. I don't want to feel like I'm ripping off The Road too much, so I think the main challenge will be making the distinguishing features that bring my own story into fruition. I like the idea of maybe a disease spreading throughout the earth and killing everything.

It should be an interesting challenge. For starters, there is only one main human character, so there is very little need to talk. Of course, I'm going to go into the backstory, of the pilgrim living on his farm with his wife and child. Switching between that and his journey to find any sort of human colony yet unaffected by the disease and helping them rebuild society. At the moment it's not sounding incredibly over the top bizarro, but I've got a few elements planned out nicely that won't fall into the category of "weird for the sake of being weird" but will be weird to serve a purpose that progresses the story and has its own weird logic to it. I don't want to go into details too much at the moment, partly because I'm still working a lot of things out, but also partly because I don't want to reveal spoilers of those really intense plot-shifting moments that I hope I can properly execute.

Basically, out of this NaNoWriMo has come a jumble of chapters that are connected to some form of loose plot, although sometimes just doing things for the sake of it, and now, I'm thinking of refining it, and one of the stories that has come bits and pieces from NaNo has been The Pilgrim. Travelling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the pilgrim searches for one of the last surviving colonies on earth.

I'm undecided as to whether there will be zombies or not. As with The Road, I think there needs to be clear-defining moments of something drastic happening. And I should stop now before I depress myself. I'd hate to think I'm just doing a Bizarro Road rip off. It's more like The Road meets Jack and the Giant Beanstalk maybe with some punk ass mother fuckers along the way.

So, yeah, finished NaNoWriMo in 21 days. But the novel is far from finished.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Twenty

2010-11-20T10:33:00.000+08:00

Today is going to be a slow day. But that's ok because the last few days have been very productive. At the moment, I'm 44,000 words in and I'm on chapter 11. Still not yet half way there. My dream sequences are starting to revolve around the more popular characters and having some sort of flow. Still doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's fun and easy to write nonetheless.

Tomorrow is Sunday and I have nothing planned for tomorrow, so I'm planning on hitting 50,000 words tomorrow. Today will be slow, so it will balance things out. And after that, it becomes all about keeping on writing, getting as far as I can go, and working on The Giant film script as well.

I sent an email to the Eraserhead Press author, Kevin Donihe, a few days ago and I heard back from him yesterday. It was pretty much all just details for the New Bizarro Author Series he's organising/editing/publishing, so hearing back from him about that is really encouraging. I'm looking forward to post-NaNoWriMo writing, I'm hoping to get my dream sequences together and figure out which one(s) would be best to extrapolate into a bizarro novella.

Aside from that, there's not a huge amount of stuff going on. I'm still just writing, writing, writing, and occasionally I stop. I work, I go out. I went to the WA finals of the Australian poetry slam, which was really good. Entertaining, thought provoking, and sometimes, just totally weird. But it was a lot of fun.

And "I will touch you in the end."

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Eighteen

2010-11-18T17:10:00.001+08:00

I'm almost at 40,000 words and I'm ten chapters into my novel. Ten out of twenty eight. At the moment I'm feeling really good about that. I'm still having a lot of fun with it, and I think I know why. So every second chapter is a dream sequence. I can basically make up anything I want, it can be as ridiculous as I like. My last dream sequence was about my main character Cliff going with his travelling companion The Pilgrim, and The Pilgrim's pet spider Stinky, going into Toyland to meet with The Child.

Then came the real world chapter that somehow needs to compete with that? I feel like I should have written more for that chapter, and for some of the other real world chapters, but I think I ended it short (not too short though) because I wanted to get right onto the next dream. And now I'm there and I brought back Stinky and The Pilgrim. Honestly, I'm fond of those two. And I decided to be sneaky and steal the first hudred and something words from the previous chapter to get it starting in the same place. But basically, what I'd like to do with this dream sequence is give The Pilgrim more of a soul. The last one he was serving the purpose of The Child's dream, where this one I'd like to expose him as more than that.

Anyway, in traditional dream sequence fashion, I've made the plot of this dream about Cliff and The Pilgrim travelling into the mountains to go to the big cheese fountain and trade the lords of the cheese board some magic beans for a cup of cheese each (a saucer for Stinky) so that they can gain divine super powers. It should be a real hoot. And maybe something goes wrong and had a super sad ending.

So, yeah, it's all blistering along, nice and ridiculous. In the real fictional world, there is a book called Crazy Mother Fuckers, a B-grade horror film called Corpse Man and a hypothetical avant-garde film called Man Eats Breakfast. Oh, and in this place that is Perth but isn't Perth, there's this underground second hand shop in the city that sells some REALLY WEIRD SHIT.

So I'll just keep on writing, and letting things get weirder and weirder and I'll probably reach the 50,000 words quite soon ish hopefully. And then next month I might read back through it and wonder where all this crazy junk came from.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Seventeen

2010-11-17T11:59:00.004+08:00

Last night, I finished my final essay for uni for the year. I also finished reading Satan Burger yesterday too. I didn't write all that much on my novel though. However, now the only thing that's holding me back is work and a social life. Over the next few days I plan on catching up to my 2,500 word a day goal, which is at the moment 6,500 ahead of me, although I expect to most definitely have that well under 5,000 by the end of tonight.

Also, now that uni has finished, I'll be bringing a couple of projects back onto the table to finish before the end of the year. One is the film script for 'The Giant' which will eventually make its way into becoming an actual film. And other short stories for various arrangements, which I probably won't get right into until December, but they're there on the table nonetheless.

So where I am now in the novel is chapter eight, dream sequence number four. It's not as outlandish as the last dream sequence, I probably wouldn't go so far as to call it bizarro, however, it's got elements of the bizarre that could be explored further, perhaps post nano. And it stands to connect with the first dream sequence in that, yes, it will actually progress the plot along in some form. 33,000 words in and my story is finally beginning to go somewhere.

So, yeah, still writing strong, recovering from the hiccup of yesterday's unproductive novelling, and I'm glad I still managed to write something down, even if it was only about 700 words. Keep pushing forward, keep writing, and hopefuly I'll have that 2.5k a day target pegged down soon enough, and maybe I'll even hit the 50,000 word target by November 20. I would be thrilled to achieve that.

Now, on to a brief book review of Satan Burger.

The book is really hard to explain outside of "this shit is fucked up" but I'll try anyway. It's got something to do with God and Earth being sick of regular human beings, so heaven's closed and this portal, the 'walm' has opened up and is feeding on people's souls, turning them into soulless, boring creatures that do little but stand around and stare at walls and shrug. In addition to sucking people's souls, the walm allows strange alien beings onto Earth, and these beings are loved by God and by Earth because they are much more interesting. They're sexual, they're violent, they're very full on. In other words: STRANGE = GOOD. So Satan starts a burger joint to collect people's souls, and the main characters work there so they don't lose their own souls.

It's an entertaining read, no doubt, but it's also got some interesting ideas going on as well. It's quite a clusterfuck, but it ties up some good plot points that initially seem like they're there just to be strange. I'm probably not doing a good job explaining the book, but really, there is so much going on it's really difficult to give an accurate, concise summary without just reading the blurb. I'm not surprised it's a cult classic. It's full on, disturbing, amusing, and occasionally thought provoking stuff. A few basic spelling and grammatical errors slipped through the editing process, but for an underground literary movement just beginning to blossom, I'm more than happy to nudge those little inconsistencies aside and say that this Carlton Mellick III certainly knows how to tell an entertaining story. I am hesitant to recommend this to too many people because it doesn't hold back at all, but if you like being disturbed in strange new ways, I recommend giving it a read.

I've also bought Mellick's sequel-of-sorts, Punk Land, which I'm waiting to arrive eagerly in the mail.

Anyway, back to novelling I go...

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Fifteen

2010-11-15T10:19:00.000+08:00

Day fifteen, the halfway mark. I'm already almost 5,000 words over the 25,000 words, so whatever I have at the end of today I plan to at least double that by the end of the month. However, I have to write my last essay for uni some time over the next two and a half days, so that should slow me down a bit, hopefully not too much.

I have finished the bizarro story that I dropped into the novel as an extended dream sequence, and it turned out to be a 13,000 word long chapter. So I'm pretty happy with that, for four-five days writing. I've got a few other strange dream sequences lined up, which hopefully should be just as fun to write.

I've also sent an email out to the guys at Eraserhead Press regarding their New Bizarro Author Series, because they're looking for young, up-and-coming bizarro authors to publish novellas and short stories and things. So I sent them an email to find out if I'm eligible to get in on that. I would be seriously so amazed and thrilled if they'd be willing to put me into print in book form.

So now my novel's back into the realm of the real, and I'm still managing to roll along with the plotless narrative and still actually have stuff happen. Although I think a few more chapters in, I'll have to start developing the comarama narrative of Cliff seeking the coma kid, but there's plenty of time for that later. At the moment it's sort of turned into a twisted romance novel between the two social outcasts, Cliff and Zelda, and their struggle to resist the social norms. It's a sort of hauntingly sentimental undertone that runs parallel to all the strange things that happen in the novel. I think, as things stand at the moment, no one thing is more important than the other, things just happen and Cliff rolls with the punches and keeps going against the grain.

I haven't plotted out the second half of the real world story yet, but I've got an idea what I want to happen. However, I'm only 7 chapters in, and it'll be another 7 before I reach the half way marker in my novel, so it may be that I only make it half way through my novel over the course of November. Which is both really exciting and disheartening at the same time.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Thirteen

2010-11-13T10:20:00.000+08:00

I've just woken up, so no writing just yet. As of last night I was 3 days and 5,000 words ahead of the 50,000 word target and 2 days and 5,000 words behind my 75,000 word target. But yeah, as things stand right now, I am over 25,000 words into NaNoWriMo, aka over the half way mark by day twelve. The past three days I have written about 9,000 words and It's all part of the one chapter. I'm 10,000 words into the ice-popsicle dream sequence and I think it's not going to go on too much further. Maybe another 5,000 words. Then he'll wake up and continue with the story like nothing happened.

But yeah, as things stand right now, I'm 6 chapters in to the novel, which is 28 chapters long. And it's only really this one chapter (and I suppose the chapter before it) that's making the book seem long. A ten thousand word chapter alongside a five thousand word chapter alongside four two-to-three thousand word chapters will feel like stretching the novel out a bit. But hopefully the rest of the novel should be quick writing. The original plan was a chapter a day, making each chapter around 2,500 words, but with three 3,000 word days on the one chapter, maybe longer chapters is just something that's naturally fitting to this book. I mean, realistically, a 10,000 word chapter is not outrageously long. I think it's around the 20-30 page mark. Considering most of my other chapters are around ten pages and under, well, I dunno, I'll just have to get used to it.

I'm thinking maybe, once I'm done with the first draft, the direction I should take with the novel should be to play it up as a novel of short stories, playing up the real world chapters as micro stories in themselves. And maybe if I go all out making the whole thing disturbing and 'bizarro' enough I could pitch it to eraserhead press, maybe. We'll see once I've written this thing. I'm probably going to get in touch with them some time this month anyway, just to see what sort of stuff they're looking for and if I'm eligible at all.

So yeah, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited about this. These past twelve days have been really exciting for me. And I'm a little nervous at the moment as I'm about to hit roadblock number two, aka my final uni assignment for the year. And then all that's stopping me from reaching my goal is a couple of parties. But it should be good, break up the constant novelling, see what this whole 'outside' thing is that people keep telling me about.

And on another note, I got a couple of books in the mail on Thursday: Lost in Cat Brain Land, by Cameron Pierce, and Satan Burger, by Carlton Mellick III. I read Lost in Cat Brain Land in the one day and I'm getting into Satan Burger now.

Lost in Cat Brain Land: Where to start with this, where to start... It's a completely shitting all-consuming mind fuck of a book that is disturbing and brilliant and disturbing and awesome and disturbing and mother fucking Mr-T (that's a Satan Burger reference by the way) and that's pretty much all there is to it. Have I mentioned how disturbing it is? Well basically, it's a collection of short stories, it's not a long collection at 136 pages of large print. So it's easy to read, but the thing I really love about it, is that you have no idea what you're going to read from one page to the next. The blurb on the back gives away a lot, and there was one thing it mentioned that I was wondering where it was in the book and if I somehow glazed over it, but no, it comes down to the very last page. So yeah, it's completely weird and outlandish and full of surprises and quirks that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. But, having said that, Pierce writes this shit like a conventional author. He'll inject human emotion into a slab of meat that is apparently some guy's son, or he'll make the motherless housewife grow desparately affectionate for the thing that crawled up the shower drain. It's stuff you can't really pack into a summary of the book. If you try to describe the book, it'll turn into a clusterfuck of things that make no sense. But it's most certainly not about weird things that happen for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It's about weird things that happen that we find ourselves strangely interested in and attached to. That, and Pierce switches from first person perspective, to third person to second person between stories so effortlessly, it really turns this book from just another random shit-fest into something else. I highly recommend it for people who like random and disturbing. This guy makes Douglas Adams look like a fuzzy white rabbit that does not talk. Sorry, Mr. Adams, I've tried reading the Restaurant at the End of the Universe twice now, but I found myself asking something that I never once asked myself whilst reading Lost in Cat Brain Land. Why do I care? Weird things need to happen for a reason, and I think that making this the cornerstone of bizarro fiction will set the truly great apart from the lackluster.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Ten

2010-11-10T21:58:00.000+08:00

So I'm at a point in my novel where I've decided to just drop in a bizarro novella of a dream sequence in there for no reason whatsoever other than to make things quirky and interesting. However, upon closer inspection, it's coming out sort of like what Cormac McCarthy's the Road would be like if it were written by Carlton Mellick III or Cameron Pierce.

What's basically going on is that the main character and three others are all that remains of the ice-popsicle people that live on the great travelling giant's back. All the others have melted away over the years, leaving them to walk the desolate town north, hoping to reach the giant's head and turn him back north before the spring heat turns them to puddles.

I'm only part of the way through the story, but they've run into a couple of giant ass-tumours trashing the local supermarket. As they go on, searching for shelter by day, walking and walking and walking by night, will they reach their destination in time? Can they turn this monolithic beast around in time? And what other dangerous creatures will they run into, whilst walking up Rupert's great spine?

I'm six chapters and almost 18,000 words into my novel and I'm probably around a quarter into the narrative, if that. Which is really promising for actually giving this novel some real substance, something last year's novel was severely lacking. I figure, the worst I can do is stop writing at the end of November around the 50,000 word mark and leave the novel unfinished, in which case I'll have a bunch of dream sequences which would make for interesting short stories on their own.

Anyway, I was planning on writing a considerable amount more today, so I'll get back onto that, and hopefully I'll be well into my 20,000s by tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Nine

2010-11-09T22:52:00.000+08:00

I've got two essays due over the course of November. The first one was due on Monday, and I'm glad I'm done with it, even though it's not exactly the best essay I've ever written. The next one is due next Wednesday and hopefully, I should be able to throw it together a little easier. For starters, it's not a research essay, so no scrounging around for silly little references.

What this means is that I've got plenty of time for writing that novel what I'm writing and all that, yes. I'm currently a little over 15,000 words, which is not too bad, considering I was planning to have quite a bit more written by now, and to be quite a bit further into the narrative. No matter. I'm still right on track for reaching 50k, even though I'm only just starting my sixth chapter out of twenty eight, and it's going to be a long one.

Compared to JulNoWriMo, the narrative aspect of my novel feels a lot better. My chapters are coming in at around the 2-5k word mark, as opposed to just hitting 1k with very little substance. I guess I normally have this problem because I'm not a very elaborate writer. I usually keep things as short and punchy as possible, which usually means I make happen what I want to happen quite quickly, with very little messing about between.

But this time, I'm making things more about the characters. It's good to get them to just sit around and talk with little else happening. I've been able to develop a lot of interesting ideas. And while I'm really enjoying how my writing is coming out, I know that I will have to change a lot when it comes to editing this mother. While the chapters are a lot larger and fuller than I'm used to, it's still really short and undeveloped. Things happening then other things happening with very little connection or relevance between the two.

So yeah, while I'm still stuck in wreckless first draft writing mode, I know that at the end of it I'll really have to sit down and nut out how I want to seriously approach this. There'll be plenty of time for that later. Right now I'm catching up on all the slacking off I did over the past few days when I was working on this annoying little essay. Oh well, I've got the next two days off, and I'm hoping to get well into the 20,000's by then. I'm hoping the writing doesn't dry up by then.

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Five

2010-11-05T18:11:00.000+08:00

I didn't write much yesterday and I've only got a few days until a major research essay is due for uni. So the next few days are going to be pretty full on. But disregarding that for a moment, I'd like to talk about the subject matter of my novel for a moment.

It's completely and utterly fucked. I knew that it would be, to some extent, going into this thing. Basically, I think the entire thing is going to be about death. I could go chapter by chapter and say what is wrong with each, but so far, four chapters in, there's pedophilia, attempted murder, a ghost that convinces people to commit suicide, amongst other things, and I'm yet to really get into the swing of things.

Needless to say, I think I've really hit the ground running, come out swinging, cue action montage. Sure, it's hard to write some of the things I do, but for the most part, I think my main character is a likeable antihero, and thus, he's not completely cruel or lacking any form of morality just yet. Although I do believe that my novel sounds much more grim and unsatisfying when lining the themes up alongside eachother. In reality, the second chapter is quite charming and the ghost in the fourth chapter is likeable in spite of his wanting you to jump out that window. I think it's this that is making the novel really fun to write. It's all about death and ugly themes that relate to death, but it handles it in a black humour sort of way. Like people jumping out of buildings, the things that go splat in the night. That's Hunter, the ghost in the hotel. :)

NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Three

2010-11-03T15:44:00.000+08:00

Ok, progress on my NaNoWriMo novel is coming along great, despite minor annoyances, such as having a cold and uni assignments and all that. I've finished two chapters and plan on getting well into my third by the end of the day. I'm keeping on top of the 1,667 words per day target quite comfortably, although I'm a little behind on my personal target of 2,500 words per day. No matter, things should run a lot faster once these last few assignments are done, I'll really kick things up a notch about half way through the month. I've still got a lot of planning to do for the last 2/3rds of the novel, I'm not exactly sure what will happen there, but I'm only really working off loose outlines anyway, putting a larger emphasis on language and characterisation to drive the novel along. I'm still planning on having a bizzaro novella dream sequence in the middle somewhere but that still won't be for a while. I'm currently over five and a half thousand words in, planning to write quite a bit more this afternoon, so we'll see how that goes.

I think that it's definitely turning out better than last year's novel, and my JulNoWriMo attempt. Hopefully, the finished product will be somewhere around the 70-80,000 word mark.

Inferno: Does not computer

2010-10-29T18:32:00.000+08:00

I'm going to keep pushing my zine because at the moment it seems it's just my literary peeps who have checked it out, and partly because they had to.

Anyway, I recently finished reading Inferno. Dante's Inferno. Part one of the divine comedy, which I'm sure you've heard of at some point in your life. Not bad for something written around 700 years ago. Something like that. Now, I think it'd be cool to write reviews for books, music, movies, that sort of thing because I think people don't really know how to do it well.

I felt kind of hypocritical reading Inferno because for a book so well known as a 'classic', I really hated it so, and I couldn't exactly figure out how it sustained its status for so long. However, I feel compelled to define 'why' I hate this book so, and I think I've got it all figured out.

For starters, it is translated from Italian. I recently read 'If On a Winter's Night a Traveller' by Italo Calvino, which is also an Italian translation, but that book, on the other hand, was brilliant. The translation is a problem because Inferno is an epic poem written in the 14th century, and not a postmodern novel written in the '80s. In the popular penguine copy I read, the original Italian was written on the left pages and the translations on the right. I could see skimming down that the Italian side rhymed, where, understandably, the English side did not. If you can read Italian, by all means, give the book a chance, I don't know, it may be infinitely better in its original language.

Now, I don't know whether this is limited to the popular penguin edition, or whether all translations into English bare this fault, but the wording is painful to get through. No one speaks like that, no one writes like that, it just doesn't follow any logical grammatical progression (which I should point out, is pretty basic stuff for a classic). So it could well be that the person that translated the text was some form of poetic babboon, but if there's large chunks of dialogue where you don't know who is saying what, then you have a bit of a problem.

My copy of the book also comes with an extensive introduction and an extensive chunk of notes at the end. I don't really fancy going through all of that to make sense of the jumbled catastrophe that is Dante's descent into Hell. Really, if you take away the introduction, the Italian version of the poem and the notes, you have a 150 page book padded out to over 500 pages. Fuck that.

And while I must admit, there were a few short bursts of decent imagery, it just wasn't enough to maintain the interest of my 21st century brain. Which brings me to my final point. I think the book is terrible (note: "I think") because I'm reading it in the wrong century. I am most certain that the book gained popularity in the 14th century was because it was the sort of thing people enjoyed reading back then. But not now. It's a classic because it was a defining and cutting edge piece of literature for its time, as is pretty much most classics. Which is why I think that people may often be disappointed by the classics. Yeah, they were brilliant for their time, and some may still be brilliant today, but some just can't keep up with our radically changing tastes and fall limp. Still remembered, but not enjoyed as they once were. Sorry Dante, I was born 700 years too late to enjoy your divine comedy.

An all-consuming black hole

2010-10-27T15:27:00.000+08:00

If you haven't already, please download my zine 'Splinters'. I'd really appreciate it. And thanks to those who have already downloaded it and read through it, and even exchanged a few words with me about it.

Right now, it seems there's an endless black hole of a 'to-do' list hovering over me at the moment:

Tomorrow I'm performing in the WA heats of the Australian poetry slam, link here.

At uni I have a 20 minute stage play to write (which is coming along fantastically, I must admit, of the 4-5 pages I have written), 2 essays and 2 other little reflection/report things.

After that I'll get right onto wrapping my head around writing a 20 minute film script to eventually produce with a friend.

And of course, the start of next week is the start of November is the start of NaNoWriMo, in which I'll be trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

So that's what I'm busy with at the moment. But it should be a lot better in about two week's time where my goals list will be about half the size. I would, however, like to focus in on a couple of things on that list.

NaNoWriMo, there's always 1001 things I can say about it. But I take sympathy on you and will try to keep things brief. This year I'm going postmodern lit fic. Takes place over two weeks, with one chapter for each day (reality) and night (dream) of my protagonist/anti-hero's tragic little life. So it's basically a chapter a day, which I'll probably write in Stream-of-consciousness to make it easier to slip into the 'anything goes' mindset of NaNoWriMo, but also to really sink into the character and be strange/postmodern.

I'm doing a couple of things to warm up, to get ready for NaNoWriMo this year. I've started doing a flash-a-day thing, where I'll basically write a flash fiction piece, usually a sentence or two that hints towards something that needs context to mean something. That's something I'll be looking to maintain over November and beyond. And the other thing I'm doing is typing up Fight Club into my computer. I figure, taking the time to write the words up will give me time to absorb what they're doing, and how it's all set up. I don't know yet if I'll just do a chapter or two and move on to another book or something, but I'm thinking, come November, I might use it to warm my fingers up before I start working on my own novel.

And another thing I'd like to talk about is the books I've read recently. I've been meaning to talk about them, but just never got around to it. You can see on the side there, a list of "currently reading" and "recently read" books. Strangely enough, those lists correspond to books I am currently reading and books I have recently read, respectively.

"Haunted" - by Chuck Palahniuk
Where to start this one is to say that it's not for the faint-hearted. If you get grossed out easily, you probably won't see the appeal in this book. I, for one, loved it. It's dark, it's brutal, it's cringingly funny, I found that while I was reading it I was thinking, 'is this guy for real'? It's a strange and uncomfortable journey, and while there is some doubt whether it's just some elaborate hoax put out by Palahniuk purely to revolt his readers, there is an interesting theme that underlies the narrative, and that is how people transform at the prospect of fame.

The novel (I guess you could call it a novel) consists of a series of short stories and poems brought together by an overarching narrative. Basically, a group of people respond to an ad regarding a writer's retreat. They find themselves locked in an abandoned theatre and the situation turns into a sort of reality tv type scenario, where the writers turn against each other in search of the story that will bring them more fame and glory than the person before them. I highly recommend it if you're not easily grossed out or offended.

"Wild Surmise" by Dorothy Porter
I read this, as I did 'The Monkey's Mask' within a very short time frame. It's the second verse novel of hers that I've read, and it follows a scientist (a biological astrologist? something like that) as she searches for signs of life on Jupiter's moon, Europa. Of course, that's juxtaposed with her domestic life, and the sexual conflicts with her partner and her lesbian colleagues. It's a good read, and she really is a master of metaphor, but I felt that it didn't quite have the edge that 'The Monkey's Mask' did.

"Fahrenheit 451" - by Ray Bradbury
It took me a long while to get into this book, especially considering how short it is. And I'm not sure if I finished it so quickly because I was truly fascinated by it or whether I just wanted to reach the end. It's a dystopian novel about book burning, and the censorship of ideas. The content was really good, but I can't help but feel that the execution was lacking something. It wasn't as richly involving as I'd have liked, it was very narrowly focused on the main character and it ended quite abrubtly. It's a good dystopian novel, I feel I should really get on to reading 1984 and Brave New World so that I've got more to compare it to. At the moment I can only really compare it to 'A Clockwork Orange', which I have to say, there really is no competition. A good book? Yes, definitely. But it's certainly no masterpiece.

"If on a Winter's Night A Traveller" - Italo Calvino
I was really excited to read this book. It didn't take me too long to read this one, and, like with 'Fahrenheit 451' I finished it in much of a fluster. However, I finished this one so fast because I was compelled to read on, I was fascinated by this book.

It's told in the second person, which, I know, will immediately put some people off. However, Calvino has tackled it from a really fascinating perspective, and as the book progresses the "I" character who is posing as the author distinguishes the "you" as a character known as "the Reader", as opposed to the "you" that is actually reading the book. As such, he plays around with the narrative style, and calls to question a number of writing techniques he uses throughout the novel. It's a very clever story, and it's very playful in the way it goes about telling the story. I'd imagine even if you're not a fan of the second person point of view, you'd be able to see the charm Calvino's invested into the character.

The narrative itself follows the Reader as he tries to read the book 'If on a Winter's Night A Traveller', only to find a printing error, which leads him on to the rest of the book. So it's made up of 12 chapters referring to the character trying to find his books, and 10 chapters of the starts of the books he finds but can not finish. It's very clever and very entertaining, and sometimes utterly perplexing, but if you like reading books that make you think then it's most definitely worth the read.

Splinters: Now available

2010-10-23T14:18:00.000+08:00

Yep, right at this moment, I'm uploading 'Splinters' in e-zine format. It's 28 pages long, as opposed to the 32 pages of the printed copy that is my assessment. The main thing that's missing is a second person stream-of-consciousness piece which I can't technically 'publish' because it's in the Wet Ink short story competition, and would otherwisebe breaching the terms and conditions of that competition.

And the upload is done! You can download the e-zine here, and enjoy its literary goodness. It was a lot of fun to make, and now that I'm done with it, a few possibilities remain:

Should I try to reproduce the zine physically also? To sell?

Should I make another issue? If so, I doubt it would be anything like the original, simply because I was spending hour after hour, day after day messing about with shit trying to pull it together. It was quite exhausting, to be quite honest. I'd like to imagine that further issues would be more organised, less 'experimental', and probably as a result, less aesthetically pleasing.

And with that, I was wondering, should I go on to make another issue, should I keep it just to my own work, or possibly include writing/artwork of friends? That's if they'd be interested, of course.

But at the moment, I've just got the one issue, done, the .pdf available to you. And I'd really love it if you'd care enough to download it, give it a read, and maybe even let me know what you think. And while it's been exhausting, it's also been a lot of fun. And it's good to have something to show for my work, good for my confidence, really, heading into NaNoWriMo, with a ton of assignments and other assorted projects in the works.

I suppose I should probably also mention the sort of things you'll find in this zine. Mostly, it's poetry and prose poetry, some flash fiction, a bit of amateur DIY art, and the first part to the verse novel I started writing a while ago. It's a bit of a literary mixed bag, hopefully there's at least one thing in there you'll enjoy.

So yeah, zine, download, enjoy.

Thanks.

Curiouser and curiouser...

2010-10-14T12:33:00.002+08:00

Honestly.

Honestly.

I. Don't. Know.
I just don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I've done a lot of work on my zine over the past few days. I've been messing around with the artistic appearance of the zine, turning some of the pieces into visual poetry. I've got four poems and four flash fiction/prose poems all up eight pages. It's about 1,300 words in, and I've got 3,000 words to play with. I'm thinking of putting the prologue of my verse novel-in-progress in the zine as well, which is nine poems and about another 800 words. But the more I scan images into my computer, the stranger it gets. It started off with a picture of a tree drawn with coffee and cordial and the printer ink alignment page that I accidentally left in the scanner. Then a tomato-sauce fingerpainting of the colour of mars. My main piece (which I'll leave out of the pdf because of pending publication issues, if/when it's rejected I'll put it back in) is just columns of the story cut out and stapled back together, although I've broken it up with other micro stories stealing parts of the pages. Then I wrote a poem backwards on my hand, scanned that and reversed it, scanned my jumper, inverted it and wrote a collage poem I pulled from my IKEA catalogue (the poem's called "IKEA catalogue". And then I scanned in the random doodles off my pencil case and put that on the cover.

So really. Honestly. I don't know where this zine is going to end up, what it'll look like when it's done, my guess is as good as anyone else's. But yeah, I'll have a few more poems, a few more flash fic pieces in the mix, and I don't know, should I put the prologue to my verse novel in there too?

Whatever, I'm having a blast just messing around with whatever I can get my hands on.

First page of my zine

2010-10-12T12:34:00.003+08:00

I've mentioned a few times before on here about 'Splinters', the zine I'm creating for my experimental writing class. I've basically got a whole bunch of poetry, prose poetry and flash fiction that I'm going to compile into a zine.

Well, the idea is to bring it all together in a way that not only reads in an interesting way, but also looks interesting from an artistic perspective. Right now I'm just messing around with it, trying to find what will work and what won't. I've got my first page done, and I thought I'd post it up here to see what you guys think. If it works out right, you should be able to click on the image and see it at its full size. Here I've got two poems, 'Poem of Ten Lines by Ten Syllables' and 'Porcelain Doll'. I drew the tree on paper with coffee and green cordial then scanned it into the computer. The lines and stuff on Porcelain Doll were just the scanner's colour alignment test page I forgot to take out of the scanner the last time I changed the printer cartridge, so I just messed about with basic colours and effects and stuff.

So yeah, just having some fun with it, trying to be quirky and interesting.

Comarama: NaNoWriMo 2010

2010-10-10T12:50:00.003+08:00

It's getting towards that time of year again, my second turn at NaNoWriMo. In the months approaching, I've had quite a lot of ideas buzzing through my head, and at one point I decided to work through bits and pieces of all of them. And then I developed a few ideas for one piece more than the others, and I think I've whittled it down to the one novel I'm going to write over November: Comarama.

In the grand plotting and scheming of things, there is a lot of progress to be made, especially since I want this story to triumph over last year's very basic novel. And considering my JulNoWriMo attempt was just a free for all, make it up as I go along sort of thing, and that it just sort of fizzled out, the plan is to come prepared for something a little more intricate than a stock-standard hero's journey.

Basically, Comarama is a story of two alternating plotlines. The "night" plot which occurs in the narrator's dream world when he's asleep, and the "day" plot which occurs when he's awake. Simple enough. So the concept with the dream aspect of the story is that he's gradually learning that he's tuning in to the bizarre and surreal dream world of a child in a coma. Meanwhile in the real world he's looking for a sense of purpose. The story starts when he takes a two week holiday to get away from his work, his family and his friends. He tells everyone he's heading east, but while he's looking to escape, he's not going to find what he's looking for in another city. He parks his car at the airport and catches a taxi to a hotel in the city, where he hopes he'll find some perspective viewing his hometown as a stranger, a tourist. What makes this place so frustrating? So difficult?

I don't know yet, but I've got until the end of October to really flesh my ideas out before I start writing. At least now, I feel there's some sort of drive in the two plot lines, and clear indicators that somewhere down the path they will intersect. I expect these next few months to be quite interesting.

Sterile

2010-10-08T16:39:00.002+08:00

This is the poem I performed at the Cottonmouth open mic on October 7:

Sterile

Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed,
but airborne dust particles are killing your children.
They're killing your brothers and sisters,
your mothers, your fathers,
killing your family pets.

Do not be alarmed, but the invisible dirt monster is the black plague of our time.
All the AIDS, the cancer, the influenza pandemics throughout history,
they are nothing to the dust mites in your carpet.
The bacteria that manifests on your doorknobs.
The germs that spread on your money, passed from hand to hand
like coughing cultural cancer directly into your wallet.

Ladies and gentlemen,
the great dirty germ plague is the nine eleven of twenty ten.
This war on bacteria is a war for all that is good and pure and sacred.
And it is as they say, cleanliness is next to godliness.

So we fight this war,
we are the soldiers, we are the warriors of this great OCD war.
We spend forever washing our hands of dirt and disease.
And we fight for our future, for our children,
for our children's children,
and our stories will be told for generations to come.

And we take our buckets and mops in arms,
our rubber gloves, our germ-proof armour.
And everything is a filter on a filter on a filter,
and dynamite Johnny is manning the control board,
waiting for the ok from HQ to fire the hydrogen peroxide bomb.

The invisible flying particle monsters,
they don't stand a chance against our diligent scouring of the earth.
Against our toxic cleaners that obliterate everything in their path.

Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed,
but this is not a war without casualties.
Dust and dirt is breeding in your public toilets.
Germs are hiding in your clothes, in your hair.

Do not be alarmed, but the bacteria is everywhere.
Under a black light, this world is one massive pathogenic swamp.

We are host.
They are master.

And you can wash your hands before and after everything you do.
Wash your hands. Rinse and repeat.
Because washing your hands brings you momentary cleanliness
brings you momentary godliness.

And after you kiss your children goodnight, take a steaming hot bath to kill their diseases.
You don't want to catch the cooties, the collywobbles, the snot-goblins.
And you keep the anti-bacterial hand wash under your desk at work
because you don't want to catch the Monday-itis that's currently going around.
You hide behind a filter on a filter on a filter,
and you wash your hands and wash your hands and wash your hands,
and you scrub your hands to the bone.

And tonight, ladies and gentlemen,
I stand before you as a mad man with a death wish above my head that reads:
“I do not live in fear of these germs.
I want to keep the common cold common,”
do not be alarmed, when I cough and sneeze, but instead, celebrate my immune system
that has sacrificed so much for me to be here tonight,

but these airborne particles, these dust mites in your carpet,
that are killing your children, and your children's children,
these are the nine eleven of twenty ten.
And tonight, I stand before you as a dying man at the gallows, waiting to be hanged,
waiting for the executioner to pull the lever
and wash his hands,
and walk away.

First time for everything: Performance poetry

2010-10-06T14:50:00.002+08:00

Ok, so tomorrow night I'm going down to Cottonmouth to try my hand at performance poetry. I haven't done performance anything for about three years. Not since Country Week in year twelve, speech and monologue. I used to hang out with the drama/music crowd a bit at school, but I was never all that flamboyant or self-confident.

So I guess I'm doing this open mic thing for a number of reasons. I'm definitely not doing it to launch a career in spoken word poetry, that's for sure. The way I see it, I'm getting out there, having my work seen and heard, rather than in the occasional uni magazine, which people may or may not just skim right over. I wrote a poem for Cottonmouth three days ago, I think. And I rewrote it two days ago. And rewrote it again last night. I'll probably iron it over a few more times before tomorrow night just to make sure it's all running smooth.

From what I've heard there's going to be a number of familiar faces from my experimental writing class there, so that should hopefully ease the nerves somewhat. And it's definitely helping me to actually go through with it. I think the more people that know what I'm doing, the easier it is for me to come to terms with getting on stage and doing it. I'm still shitting myself at the thought of it, but I think it's normal for me. I just need to do it. And the more people I know who are there tomorrow night, the better. So come on down to the Rosemount hotel tomorrow night, $5 entry, and watch me take to the stage for the first time.

The finer things club

2010-10-02T23:02:00.003+08:00

I imagine a lot of authors start out with about a bazillion ideas for their books. Maybe a bazillion and one. And the process from there I imagine is somewhat like gold panning. Sifting through countless grains of muddy earth for the little nuggets of ideas that will move people through the bookstores.

I feel like where I'm at right now is at the beginning, wondering where to start looking to find my nuggets. And I feel like I've been grabbing handfuls of dirt and sifting through them that way, maybe finding something, maybe finding nothing. And each handful is all over the place. One over here, one over there, and each little nugget is a story, an idea. But I think that perhaps, for the scale I'd like to go for, that my scope is too narrow, that I'm starting small and then packing up and moving to a different location and trying my luck there. I need to broaden my horizons and really open up my ideas, to bring them together, to let them work to my advantage.

This all comes with practice and refinery. Efficiency. Gradually working outwards. I start with a couple of handfuls of dirt and sift. I work outwards, more, sifting dirt for nuggets of gold, I start with a small handfuls of ideas, and gather a few more, but nothing remotely close to a bazillion.

Or maybe, as a young writer, with lots of experience still to gather, I'm dwarfed by the many success stories out there, how these people must work so hard on one thing for so long until it appears so refined and effortless and genuine, 24 carat gold bullion.

I have ideas, I don't think that's a problem at all, but I think the real trick, the real illusion comes in putting those ideas into motion.

On an unrelated note: On my frequent passing across the internet, I've noticed two titles that have recently come into print that I am looking forward to getting my mitts onto. The first being "Dreadnought", the second novel in Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century steampunk series. The first novel, Boneshaker, was simply amazing. I had to order it in, and while I hope Dreadnought will be more easily accessible, I'll order this one in too if I have to. The second is Scott Westerfeld's "Behemoth". Sequel to Leviathan. It's another steampunk title, set around the first world war, and while I found Leviathan to be less captivating than Boneshaker, it's more of a book you read for fun, for entertainment. I guess I'd say the Leviathan series is to Steampunk as Harry Potter is to fantasy. Sort of. Whereas the Clockwork Century is set in an adult's world, dealing with more mature issues than you'd expect from reading the blurb of the books. It's got me sort of back into the excitement of steampunk, if not as much as last year, but I'll probably have a few more words to say when I read the books, but after my last year's NaNoWriMo steampunk novel, I doubt I'll try anything like it again for quite a while.

Splinters: An experimental new zine on the horizon

2010-09-26T22:48:00.003+08:00

So, for my final experimental writing assignment, I've chosen to create a zine. And, as the title suggests, it's got fragments of lots of stuff. The central focus is on poetry, prose poetry and flash fiction, and at the moment, I'm just under half way to the word limit. Most of it is one stream-of-consciousness prose poem, and the rest is short poems or flash fiction ranging from about 10-100 words. Some of it I wrote a while ago, some of it is real recent, some of it's just made up on the spot. But I'd like to think each piece has got its own charms.

What I've got so far:
Poem of ten lines by ten syllables (poem)
Mars (flash fiction)
Mr Goody Two Shoes (prose poem)
Waste-Paper Basket (poem)
Facebook Status Update: 23/09/2010 (flash fiction)
He Don't Live Here (flash fiction)
Brains (poem)
Linear Haiku (poem)
Someone told me... (flash fiction)

It's nothing really profound. Most of it's just little quirky stuff that's just good for a laugh. I'm also currently playing around with writing a poem called "Drunf" (in which I replace every instance of the letter 'k' with 'f' for no particular reason) and a story called 'A story I stole from a friend while they weren't looking', which isn't stolen, or based on anything anyone's written or shown me, more so it's just an opportunity for me to write something purposely bad and pretend I didn't write it. I was considering something along the lines of Twilight fanfiction, but I'm not sure yet.

But, as you can see, I'm not concerning myself with writing something amazing or brilliant. I'm just focussing on these quirky little stories and poems, and actually having fun with it. I've got a poem or two (I think it's just one at the moment) on facebook (brains) but I don't know, I may post some more things up there or up here, or just email what I've got to people who are interested in having a squizz. I'd like to put it up online when it's done, maybe, as an e-zine, I don't know, but again, that's if people would want it. Anyways, back to the random writings...

Some kind of method

2010-09-24T22:59:00.004+08:00

I never really thought of myself as a writer with a set moethod. I just do what I do, and it just 'is'. I like trying to blur the line between prose and poetry, however distinctly different and polarised my prose and poetry may seem.

I think, with poetry, it needs that strong core idea to begin with, as my poetry tends to be quite short. It needs presence, an idea, something specific that draws meanings and imagery from the text. I've found death is a good theme to work with, but I don't usually start on death until my poem's taken form. To me, poetry needs to really sink in. There's just no use having everything all out in the open. It would be boring. Easily dismissable. I recently wrote a poem about a terminally ill man whiling away the last of his days in an airport bar. I like to play with structure or sound, and sometimes I just feel like writing whatever, cutting out whatever lands on the page and letting it find its natural harmonies. As I'm having to think more and more about performance poetry recently, the more I feel compelled to define my poetry as primarily text-based. Sure, I'd like to write stuff that sounds nice, but I think you can fit more meaning onto a piece of paper than you can in air.

I feel like my prose is more liberating. It can start anywhere. It can end anywhere. It can mean whatever it wants to mean. Yes, ideas are good, but to me, short stories are something to mull over, to really let sit in the brain until new elements decide to reveal themselves. I feel like poetry is something best captured in the moment, whereas prose is a journey that takes the reader places. I feel like I can chop and change my mind with my short stories, and often enough I find myself bursting with excitement when I figure out a new idea that unlocks so many new ideas. And it can sometimes work as a chain of unexpected events, sort of like a Rube Goldberg story-writing-machine you could say. My last story was about a haunted blues club that drives a man to a violent madness. My current story is about the archangel, Gabriel turning his back on God and being reincarnated as Lucifer's brainchild; which then brings about a catastrophic apocalypse, with angels falling from the sky as Gabriel and Lucifer convert the world to Nihilism. Or something like that.

A lot of the time I try to tell people what my stories are about, and I find it difficult to say. Sometimes they're not about anything significant just yet, and I can't really define it, and sometimes I can't really say what it's about until it's finished.

Sometimes it feels painfully chaotic, sometimes it feels utterly hopeless. My collective writings are a real mess. But I think my method is one that works well for me - I play around with ideas until they feel right. I play around and try to have fun with it. Sometimes have fun with it. And I think that people see that I'm trying to do something different and interesting, and all I can hope is that they enjoy what I do. Not that my audience is all that large or anything...

Existential rambling: Salt

2010-09-21T11:59:00.002+08:00

I started working on a new short story last night. I started again this morning. And I'm starting over again, for the third time and I think I've got the opening I want. I figured, might as well post the ramblings of my second attempt here:

We are a generation of people afraid to ask the hard questions. Put the chips in the deep fryer for five minutes. Burger bun. Meat, sauce, cheese, salad. Wrap it and bag it. Salt on the fries. Salt of the earth, it's not. Salt of your enemies rubbed into your eyes. Take it with a pinch of salt. Coke water, lollywater, take it with a pinch of salt. Generation of people who can't form questions beyond the point of fries; yes or no. Yes or no. Do you believe in God? Backs arch up like stray cats protecting their turf. We don't take kindly to your kind around here. Take your God talk and haul it off a cliff with some bricks. Forget faith, talk fries. Run your mouth over with a cheese grater and then tell me what you think of God.

Splinters of everything

2010-09-19T10:02:00.002+08:00

So I finished writing my short story draft for dotdotdash's 'Jukebox' issue. And I really hope once I send it off they pick this one up.

It's about a haunted blues club on Esperance's coast. That's the easiest way to describe it. It also plays around with nested narratives, changes between first and second perspective, past and present tense, occasional splashes of almost stream-of-consciousness, and moments where I break the fourth wall.

I need to tidy up and tighten a lot of thing, but I think it's one of the most uniquely structured stories I've written, and it goes to a lot of strange places in such a short amount of time. I really hope dotdotdash pick this one up.

Over the next few months I'll no doubt be working on more short stories, a play, a performance poem, and maybe I'll come back to my verse novel which I haven't touched in quite a while. I don't have any assignments due for uni for the next two weeks, so I should have the chance to just relax, to write at my own pace, and enjoy it.

I'm also reading Ulysses at the moment, and really enjoying it. Really ripping through it.

Oh, and I'll get my results back for my first experimental writing assignment tomorrow, which I felt like I did really well in, so, fingers crossed for that. It's the unit I'm most confident in this semester, so I really want to do quite well with it...

A clusterfuck of genres

2010-09-14T12:47:00.002+08:00

I've never been particularly warm towards the concept of genre. It's a label, a definition, a category of something that just is. I've said before that I like gothic horror and sci-fi and postmodern literature. But it's so broad. I like stories that fit into those genres, but I probably won't like every sci-fi story under the sun. It's just not the way things are. I'm more genre-neutral when it comes to music, but literature, I usually prefer nontraditional or contemporary genres and styles. Like the multiplicity of 'punk' genres. I've written steampunk and dieselpunk before, and I'm attracted to ideas of splatterpunk and bizarro fiction. Sometimes I find it difficult to figure out what genre I'm writing in. It's usually pretty obvious if something's sci-fi or young adult or romance, but personally, I like to play around with generic, sneak humour in to horror, make a real disaster out of it all.

I like to think I take after Chuck Palahniuk. I like to think I share his taste for chaos and almost nihilistic anarchy. I've heard the term 'transgressive fiction' used to label his work. But I'm not Chuck, I do things different. I'm a different writer. Would I write 'transgressive horror' or 'transgressive gothic' or 'transgressive bizarro'? You could probably argue for or against any of those titles and pitch at least half a dozen more. I could probably claim my latest work was a circuspunk story, although I think, within the confines of the punk genre, it is certainly a narrow sub genre. I think at the moment I'm hovering somewhere between transgressive fiction and bizarro fiction. I want to coin the term 'pickled punk' as a literary genre. They're the fetuses you find in jars of embalming fluids at carnival freak shows. Personally, I think it fits my current style pretty well. It's a somewhat removed and transformed version of reality, not so bizarre that it has very little or no grounding in reality, but bizarre enough that it makes your stomach turn.

Could it work, could it catch on? Probably not. But it's that sort of perverse attraction towards the horror, the grotesque, the fetus floating in the pickle jar, a sort of fantastical horror that allows me to say, "hey, sure, this may be pretty sick, but now I have your attention, here's a metaphor that relates to real world character/issues of morality." So, I guess, for now, I have a genre. And it starts with the Pickled Punk monologue, from 'the Giant'. I'm thinking of turning it into a prose poem and putting it up for publication.

Like a wrecking ball

2010-09-06T21:49:00.003+08:00

I hang, suspended from a yellow crane, waiting for the eventual destruction.

For me, writing is all about buying time from my brain. Someone said something at uni today about their brain often working too fast to type down the flow of ideas. The formation of language on the page often becoming a fragment of the brilliance once envisioned, momentarily, then, gone as though it were simply never there at all.

It's like I've got a wrecking ball in my skull waiting for the words to form there, allowing the ideas to ferment (okay, maybe I've actually got a brewery in my head) before I knock them onto the page.

I've only written the one page of my stageplay, and while I plan on writing more tonight, to have a somewhat decent working draft to bring to class tomorrow, I've got a decent idea of how the story's mutated since I last wrote that page. So now I'm wondering, is this the same building that I knocked down the other day? It certainly looks different. Truth is, I don't really know.

Sometimes those spontaneous clusterfucks of words spilling onto the page without premeditative thoughts can be a godsend. Sometimes they can be fantastic filler while you think of the real juicy, real punchy words you want to throw on the page.

I'm writing an experimental short story for dotdotdash. It's linear (hmm... should I fuck with continuity too?), but the plot is something I find difficulty in putting into words. Something about a blues club and a haunted jukebox and nightmares folding in upon themselves. I've got stories within stories within stories, which sit alongside story fragments tossed about for good measure.

It's one of a very few stories that I've written that actually takes place in a real location in the real world. Sure, I made up the blues club, it doesn't really exist somewhere along Esperance's coastline, somewhere way down an old dirt track. But it does take place in a fictionalised Esperance, which you can find on a map, and the road along the cliffs and coast, that's there too. I can't recall exactly what the beaches over that side of town are like, but there are some beaches like the one I describe in the story. And, through some divine inspiration I've found myself taking the story in the most unlikeliest of places, Turkmenistan. And I'm currently about the point where I want to insert an author's note to suck the reader right out of the story to make them think about what they're reading. Like a wrecking ball, come back to reality, the fourth wall comes tumbling down.

I'm thinking of maybe making a zine out of it for my experimental writing assessment. Maybe formatting it to really flip things around. Maybe messing with typography and aesthetic apearance, or something along those lines. I guess it's sort of a natural progression from the stuff I've been writing lately. I'm usually pretty focussed on my narrator's subjective stance, playing around with language there. Now it's more layering in different voices, playing with tenses and perspectives, juxtaposing the surreal with the real, dreams commenting on reality, imagined characters commenting on real characters, authorial intrusion commenting on the narrative, blurring the lines of the story and splicing them into a multiplicity of meanings.

And the wrecking ball, swinging back and forth in my head, smashing my brains onto the floor, fragments upon fragments upon fragments that I cannot possibly pick up.

The onion metaphor

2010-09-03T15:57:00.002+08:00

I'm sure you're familiar with the metaphor. Ogres are like onions because they have layers. Simple enough.

But really, the world is full of onions. People are layered. Objects are layered with meaning. Language is layered. They're all like onions.

So what has this got to do with writing?

Come back to people. People are layered. We enjoy reading because we like it when the characters surprise us. Their minds work in ways that we don't see. I hear often enough that characters are not real people. While this is most certainly true, while characters are subjective creatures of the author's narcissistic whatever, I find it helps to pretend they are real. You need to plant them, the little onion seeds of your characters in your fictional onion-layered world, with a brownish French onion sky, and you need to pretend these characters are real within your world and they are layered with characteristics and personalities that even you haven't met yet.

I find this separates the good stuff from the bad stuff, not just in novels and short stories, but in films and in TV shows. I get sick of Mr Predictable Action hero guy because he's superficial, he's filled with shit. He's butter through and through, he's spread thin with sameness and blandness.

I recently read American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, which takes place in a god-infested America with so many archetypal gods it could have been so easy to go 'herp derp zeus throw lightning hurr', but rather it moulded these most basic of characters and ground them so deep into his world that their layers ran much deeper than our expectations.

I've recently warmed to the idea of the 'nested narrative' setting stories inside stories to comment on the original story, to mutate it, to change its meaning, to give it layers.

I think it's always good to show a few layers of a story, the characters, the layers of the narrative, and while it may be as simple as questioning the nobility of your protagonist, and while you don't need to peel through every layer that defines your character and defines your story, I think it's essential to always have something else going on, some layers to give your stories depth.

Dear Author, I feel like I know you because I read your book.

2010-08-31T23:39:00.002+08:00

Intimately.

What am I talking about?

Well, you know that moment when you first read a book and you just completely lose yourself in it? You know that feeling you get when you think of that book long after you closed the last page, and you remember exactly when and where you read that book?

I remember reading John Marsden's 'Tomorrow' series when I was a young teenager, and I remember reading the series for the second time and thinking "fuck, I wish I could read this part again for the first time", as there's nothing quite like not knowing, and then knowing, and the pleasure of feeling that for the first time.

More recently, earlier this year, in fact, I read a book and I can tell you where I was when I read it, and while the author may not have any association at all between the book and the place, those two will always share an intimate relationship as the place I first read that book.

Dorothy Porter's 'The Monkey's Mask'. I was on a plane going from Perth to Melbourne. I first heard about it last year at uni, it came up in my creative writing class and we read the first probably half dozen poems from the book. I'd been keeping an eye out for it when I went book shopping. It was quite the coincidence that I'd find it in a book store at the Perth domestic airport.

So I bought it and I started reading it in the terminal, waiting for the flight. I got through most of it on the plane, and I finished it in the hotel that night. That flight to Melbourne was running on Dorothy Porter time. That time was all about her words, her poetry, her made-world.

And now, as I attempt to write a verse novel of my own, I find the sheer possibility of it all rather comforting, that, maybe, with some dedicated hard work, maybe a bit of talent, a bit of luck, maybe someone will see my book in an airport bookstore and read it on the plane, and forever associate my words with that flight...

Scriptwriting and the elephant in the room: DIALOGUE

2010-08-29T21:14:00.003+08:00

People sometimes say that I'm good at writing dialogue. And people sometimes say that when it rains it pours. But it's not always raining.

Now, I'm going to go right ahead and state the obvious. While writing can be inspired, while it can sometimes just flow onto the page, and when it rains it pours, writing is always something that you've got to work at. Whether you're J.R.R. Tolkien spending your life's work dedicated to one vivid, ever expanding horizon, or whether you're Stephen King and every time you cough a new novel falls onto your editor's desk, you've got to work at it.

I'm not saying that my dialogue is the work of some divine inspiration that I somehow just tap into and I somehow just manage to pluck whole conversations from what might as well be my butt. What I'm saying is that dialogue doesn't have to be that hard. Inspiration helps me, yes, of course, but when I don't have that, I've got to have good old fashioned work on my side. Sometimes it's easy to confuse the two. I like to think of it this way: if you don't know what you're doing, if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, or if you don't know what you've done until you've done it and stood back and had a good look at it, that's inspiration. Whereas work is something you've got to be switched on, tuned in to. When you're working, you can listen to that inspirational voice and you can ask yourself why it might be telling you these things. If you can explain your writing, then you're certainly working at it.

I guess that the point I'm getting to now, is that no matter how inspired you may be, you can't really do much without the drive and the work put in to produce something. When it rains it pours, that is, unless it doesn't. I started writing the script for my "Writing for Performance" class today and didn't really like it. I think it's because I haven't figured out what I'm doing, or what I want to be doing just yet. I'm pulling the script from my short story "The Giant", which is set in an American Carnival, so I know what I'm doing, but I think the precise thing that I'm looking for is 'how'. How am I going to get them to do what I want them to do?

Dialogue is a big issue with scriptwriting. It's a given that there will be dialogue in plays, but I think I need to get used to the idea that there doesn't need to be dialogue everywhere. I think I really need to visualise the scene and write that. The dialogue, the actions, the expressions. What I'd really love to do is be overt and clever about it, use the dialogue, use the expressions and actions and body language of the characters to betray little secrets about themselves to the audience. That's what I'd really love to do.

Right now I just want my characters to shut up and take a smoko and give me some time to collect my thoughts. I'm in unfamiliar territory here, and while it's fun and exciting, it's also bizarre and intimidating. I'm not desperate or anything, but I think some rain would be good.

Reading and writing and all that jazz

2010-08-25T21:47:00.002+08:00

I need a new bookshelf desperately. My books are just about overflowing from my little bookshelf in my little bedroom. Literally. I have no room.

But I'll keep buying more books anyway. ;) There's still a few more at the moment that I've got an eye on. I'm thinking of maybe creating a list of the books I own and the books I've read and maybe talk a bit about them here. Well, the interesting ones, at least. A lot of them are classics or cult classics or written by authors who have written classics or cult classics.

The last book I finished was Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. Which was absolutely brilliant. He had it published when he was 21. Fuck me, people like him make me so jealous. If I write a Less Than Zero by next year I'd be over the fucking moon.

Having said that, I felt that it resonated with me very much like Cormac McCarthy's The Road did. They're both minimalist novels without a difinitive plot and with a couple of holy-fucking-shit moments that really stuck in my mind alongside the rest of the hum-drum narratives. The key differences between the two stories are that one's first person and the other's third, and one's set in '80s LA and the other's in post-apocalyptic American wasteland. Both really gripping reads.

I'm currently reading my way through Neil Gaiman's epic novel, American Gods. I've got about 200 pages to go, and right from the get go, there's a sensation of bliss caused by his elegantly spun sentences. I don't know many authors who can just phrase sentences in such a beautiful and articulate way. It stands out, to the point that I've noticed the occasional sentence that isn't quite that brilliant and it makes me disappointed, where in your average novel the sentence would slip by unnoticed. The man is a syntactical genius.

Now, on to my writing, which is all over the place at the moment. Literally. I've got bits and pieces of poems and short stories all over my desk. I'm currently working on three poems for my experimental writing class, which, I must say, I'm having a lot of fun with. There are a few restrictions, but I feel like I'm starting to balance things out nicely now. 20 lines. First poem has to be a language based poem playing around with colours. I've got a kaleidoscope of overly wordy descriptions of surrealist imagery (the line lengths would only fit on the page landscape style), and I'm playing around a bit with alliteration, rhyme, disassociation and variation. The second poem has to be a referent poem. Based on a core idea or theme. Simple enough. I've got a suicide-poem written on a burger wrapper to play with the idea of consumerism. The third poem is open, although has to relate to the exercises in the first few chapters in our textbook. I've gone with a collage poem, where I've taken sentences from four of my favourite books at random and pieced them into a poem. I need to shorten this poem a bit, but I really love how it fits together and stands on its own, showing very little trace of the original source material.

That's been keeping me entertained, playing around with language and structure and technique. but I've also got a performance script (10 minutes) to write for three weeks' time. I've got a lot of work to do on this one, but I'm going to take the 10 minutes from a short story I wrote recently and pick a scene or two from that. I've started writing out the character list, and that's about it. But I've been doing the list from the whole short story, which, I'm sure all of them won't feature in the script.

I'll have to send away my short stories for the wet ink short story competition soon. I know I should edit through my pieces a bit before I send them but I haven't touched them in a while, and from the last times I went through them nothing really leapt out at me as being horrendously terrible.

Fast forward a few months to November and I'll be trying to write 50,000 words in a month again. Although this time I'm thinking instead of trying to slog it out on one work, I'll cheat and work on several major projects. Basically, there's three that are on my mind at the moment, which I'll probably start planning out quite soon, and one other thing I'd like to try out for that month, to see if it's a viable sustainable option for me. The first project is Utopia Ltd. My quasi-surrealist anarchistic novel that I left half-baked at the end of JulNoWriMo. I'm going to strip it back and try to have more of a logical progression to it. The second project is Perpetual Dreaming. A totally surrealist epistolary narrative about a man who starts having these vivid dreams within the wild and bizarre dream world of a child in a coma, of which he is unsure there is a genuine link to a real boy in the real world, or whether the boy is just a part of his imagination. And the third project is a verse novel. I've wanted to try this out since I read Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask, and I think this would be a great opportunity. I think I'm going to try to adapt my short story, The Giant, into a verse novel (this is also the one I'm writing the script for).

And the one other thing I wanted to try was write a short story a day for the month of November. It could be 500 words, it could be 1,000 words, whatever. Just, at the end of November, have a short story for every day of the month. I read that Isaac Asimov would write a short story every day, and I read that Chuck Palahniuk follows this practice as well. And, yeah, I think Chuck's brilliant, and it's no wonder he can pump out a novel just about every year when he's deep set on writing practices such as this. I'll give it a try, see what comes out of it. Could have something that could become something more substantial, could have something that works into something else I'm writing, could be just gibberish and pointless banter. Who cares, I think it should be a good opportunity to get a schedule and just pump out new ideas. Yeah, it's not how NaNoWriMo 'should' be done, but it's all writing, it's all development, and I hope some really good stuff comes from it.

He can't do third person narrators...

2010-08-20T21:50:00.002+08:00

He, me, you. If I could choose one perspectival style and just stick with it, I would go with the first person narrator. Hands down. I'm starting to think even short bursts of second person would suit me better too. I haven't written a third person narrative in quite a while, and I guess that's because I feel like I can do more with the other two, like maybe third person's already been done to death and there's only so much I can do with it.

There are a few particular elements of writing that I find myself drawn to, particular styles I like to play around with. One of them's the blurring of poetry and prose. I like my poems to convey a clear narrative, and I like my prose to carry strong metaphoric tones. I feel like I can extract more meaning out of them that way.

Another would be grammar and sentence structure. I guess phrasing sentences to sound more natural in terms of 'speech', rather than textbook 101 English. That sort of ties back to making prose sound more poetic and poetry sound more prosaic. I think there's something inherently wonderful in the way we naturally piece sentences together, and I really enjoy trying to tap into that natural voice, to play around with the way sentences are phrased until they feel like they're weighted just right.

And then there's the narrator as a character, the narratorial voice. We live in an age where complete objectivity is pretty much obsolete, we know that meaning is subjective; to the author, the author's context, to the reader and their context, meanings are never objective or neutral and are never fixed. I feel that if I attempt to write third person, I'm just trying to hide the subjectivity of my writing (which, in itself is a challenge not without its rewards), whereas I feel that I can say more with my writing by embracing the subjectivity of my writing and just running with it. I feel that I can write a genuine first person character much better than I can a third person. I'm hesitant to use the word 'realistic' because I think that restricts the characters to a world too similar to our own, where I prefer to focus on the strange, and heighten them to what I suppose you could call a hyper-reality. I like my fictive worlds to allow for a bit of a stretch of the imagination. And I think that placing my narrator, first person, into that world, is the best place to start in shaping the world, the characters, the events, through the tinted lens of this character, so that it's all built around a particular perspective, so that it's more focussed.

I've started playing around with second person narration a little lately, and while I don't think I'll write a second perspective novel any time soon, I think that it's capable of taking a narrative in a direction that isn't possible through first or third person. It's a bit of a risky perspective to go with, particularly because people tend not to like reading a book that tells them what they're doing or how they're feeling. As a result, it's most important to set the narrative up well enough to give time for the reader to sink into the narratorial style. I've figured there's two distinct ways it can be written. As active or passive, where active has you, the narrator making the decisions and acting upon your surroundings, whereas the passive internalises the narrator and places you in a world where your surroundings act upon you. I think it's easier for a reader to experience the latter, although, for larger works, I think it comes down to a seamless instance of cohesive interaction that will both naturalise the narrator and naturalise the world in which you exist.

I don't know, I guess I'll just keep playing around with language and narration until something feels right.

Oh my god competitions!

2010-08-14T18:05:00.002+08:00

Sometimes I get caught up in my writing so much I feel like one of those Mr Potato Head toys with play-doh squeezing out of my ear holes. I get all caught up in sending my uber awesome stories to magazines and writing uber awesome novels that the reality doesn't live up to the hype in my head. Sometimes I just can't help it. Sometimes I'll start something that I was never realistically going to be able to finish. But when I look at what I have done this year, it hasn't been a great deal. At the moment, I'm supposed to be writing a novella, editing two short stories for one competition, writing another short story for another competition and writing another story based on an incomplete novel for an amateur online anthology.

I haven't submitted much short stories or poems to any magazines this year. One poem to dotdotdash that I'll hear back from in early September, and a few bits and pieces to Grok. I've got a short story being published in part in Grok at the moment, that'll be my third publication with them, my first for the year, so I'm really glad for that.

I've known about the Wet Ink short story competition for a while now, and I'll be submitting my short story from my last semester's final creative fiction piece. People seemed to like it, and it recieved a good mark, nothing outstanding, so I doubt it'll take the prize, although I'd still like to have it in the pool for consideration. I'm also submitting a second piece for the competition, a second-person stream-of-consciousness piece about two people in a bar and their coming to grips with the outside world. I wrote it for the zine I'm planning for my Experimental Writing class, but it feels right. I'll need to tweak a few things here and there, but it's certainly got an experimental edge to it that will hopefully make it stand out in the competition. First prize is $3000, deadline is the end of the month.

I came across the John Marsden Young Writers competition the other day, for which the prize (in my age bracket) is also $3000. The deadline is the 20th. Less than a week to scramble something together and mail it off. I'm really pushing it for this one I think, but I started writing something today which should be interesting. It's a first person narrative told from the perspective of a sardonic clown about his relationship with a poorly treated and misunderstood freak, the tallest man on earth. The idea sort of came from a documentary I started watching on TV a little while ago about an Asian woman with a disease which kept her constantly growing. She was in constant pain and had people gawking at her all the time, I guess it's just another opportunity for me to play around with perspective and character development.

I've got less than a week, I might do it, I might not. I've had times in the past where I'd be doing assignments and study and all that at the last minute, and I guess this is that sort of situation, and I think sometimes some people feel like I fluke my way through some of this shit. But I don't half-ass things like this. I've written down some of my thought processes on this blog, what makes me write what I do, what I'm thinking about when I tie a story together, that sort of thing, so I guess what I'm saying is that the amount of effort I put into a story or poem isn't in the time I spend writing the damn thing, but also in the premeditative thoughts that lead up to it.

I don't mean to sound like I'm full of myself here, but the most common compliment I get is that I write good dialogue. Which could be interpreted as strange because I spend precious little of my time talking. But again, there are quite a few instances in my day-to-day life where I think things through before I open my mouth. Of course, I may appear slow or quiet or whatever, but I've got whole conversations going on in my head before I mutter the word "hello".

Anyway, with all of that going, my proposed novella has taken a breather and I don't know what I'll end up doing with it. Possibly do it as a NaNoWriMo thing where I'll write my 50k in short stories/novellas, and hopefully try to finish some of the projects I've started this year but have abandoned somewhere in the nether-regions of my computer.

But I'm pulling together a handful of what I believe are interesting ideas for a chaotic, yet somewhat rigidly structured zine. I've got my stream-of-consciousness piece about good intentions and bad intentions, a bible parody in its rough first stages, probably going to change a hell of a lot (pun intended) and a series of postcards sent from my future self in hell, warning me what I'm in for. I'm playing around with a lot of ideas and having a lot of fun with it. My latest idea was to present the texts within the zine, rather than running down the page, separating them into three or four parts and running them through the pages like the narratives are sinking through the paper.

So, yeah, a lot on my plate, a lot in my head, fingers crossed I'll have my carnival piece ready to mail some time next week. Wish me luck!

Writing badly on purpose

2010-08-09T23:16:00.002+08:00

I'm all for proper grammar and spelling in most instances of literature. I don't like it when people don't bother with apostrophes or full stops because they can't be fucked or when they don't even notice that they're supposed to be there. But I'm a bit of a two-faced bastard because I love playing around with conventional notions of spelling, grammar and syntax. Oh my god beginning a sentence with And or But? Preposterous! Capitalising letters in the middle of a sentence? Ridiculous! Usually there's some sort of motive for the crime. Like drawing attention to a particular character, or portraying a particular narratorial voice. Like the one I'm using here, I like to put full stops in the middle of sentences to break up the phrases to appear more conversational. I do that a lot with my short fiction too. I like it.

The last exercise I've taken up started out as a stream-of-consciousness piece that was meant to be autobiographical but then sort of turned into a second person perspectival piece about something altogether different. But there's still that stream-of-consciousness feel of thoughts simply spilling out onto the floor and running into eachother and milling about pointlessly like no one really communicates this way but it's the best way to get everything onto the page. What's a comma? What's an apostrophe? I can leave the last full stop a kilometre behind without batting an eyelid. One word to describe it would be liberating. Another word would be self-destructive. I look at the clusterfuck of words on the page and wonder how many people would string all these thoughts together and follow this narrative of a stream-of-conscious that is sort of like an out-of-body mind directly addressing you. Would people enjoy something like that? Would they drink fine wine and nibble on exotic cheeses and mutter "mmm, quite, that S.T. Cartleford gent is quite the literary marksman"? Or am I going to be one of those guys that becomes famous once I'm dead? Probably neither, but it's fun to screw around with words knowing that I can take pride in having written something that could potentially cause headaches to those who read it.

Being lethargic is a pain in the arse

2010-08-06T21:24:00.002+08:00

So I'm still crawling out from the tail end of my cold. Writing very little. Reading a little more. Still having ideas. One problem I have a lot is not feeling like doing stuff. I think that's the medical term. That, or Can't-be-fucked-itis. But while I'm spending all this time not writing and I'm doing other stuff (like uni or work, or whatever), I'm getting ideas for more new ideas that will also probably never see the light of day. However, my latest brainwave has got me feeling a little giddy. I'd like to write a zine for my experimental writing class. Just the idea of it feels so organic and underground.

But there's nothing really experimental about that, right? That, I think, comes solely down to material. I've found that lately I've been writing as a sort of exploration of the self, or to criticise consumerism, or something. The idea so far is about doing things I wouldn't normally do because it may offend some people. I think I'm far too polite for my own good, and I think something like this could teach me something interesting about myself. And while I may not wish to find a living in being offensive 'n shit, I feel like it's something I need to do. I've got a few ideas of different pieces I could use in the zine, a few different narrative techniques, all based around the theme "I am going to hell for this..."

Should be a bit of fun. Now, I'm hoping to get a bit of writing on my novella out of the way tonight, and I'm hoping to get a bit of study done too. Now that the holidays are over, I feel like I'm trying to cram so much stuff into a small space of time, but that round peg won't fit through that damn square hole...

Minor delays

2010-08-04T12:15:00.001+08:00

So I was planning on writing a little each day on my proposed novella, and I was planning on juggling it with uni and work, and I was planning on getting my study plans in order so I can keep on top of everything this semester. Well, plans are good in theory, but unforeseen circumstances can tend to throw plans off balance and set them back a bit. Waking up early for uni and staying late for work has been a real challenge over the past couple of days due to the presence of a despicable cold. On Monday, my novella's word count was 1,273 words. And on Tuesday it didn't move at all. And I haven't written anything at all yet today. However, I've had the whole day off and I've spent most of it lounging around watching That 70s Show. I've done a little study, but I still haven't touched my manuscript yet. My cold is just about gone, and with the whole morning free (and most of the afternoon) tomorrow, I should be able to get quite a bit more study done, and hopefully get my novella up to around the 4,000-5,000 word mark. Here's to wishful thinking.

The writing experiment

2010-08-02T13:32:00.002+08:00

First day back at uni. Year two, semester two. Experimental writing; what's it all about? In the words of my tutor, "fucking shit up." Nuff sed. He also said something about the unit being nigh on impossible to fail. So I'm just going to focus on fucking shit up for that unit. I'll fuck shit up so baddd....... (tempted to write an assignment on an empty burger wrapper for the 'avant-garde-ness of it all)

I'm competing with a cold with some pharmaceutical-strong lozengers and a lemon drink that tastes so foul. I'm Mr-Mucus-Face right now, but I'm taking solace in the fact that it could be a lot worse. It's not so bad.

In terms of my writing goals, I started my novella last night and wrote 1,026 words. That's the target. I've had uni this morning, bright and early from 8:00, with a two hour class that finished an hour early. So I went to the library cafe and inhaled a delicious bacon and eggs breakfast before my 10:00 experimental writing class on the top floor of the labyrinth that is the Architecture building. I've got work late tonight, but I'll have a good three hours to eat, rest and write my 1,000 words before midnight. That's my self-appointed curfew because tomorrow is another 8:00 start at uni.

And in my experimental writing class is the Grok editor, who informed me that a segment of a first semester piece of mine is in the next edition of the magazine. First publication of the year. Hopefully, with this new connection, I might have a spot in the next two editions of the magazine.

I'm going to try to keep record of my progress on here, to make things easier to manage. I know not many people read this (maybe just person?) but at least it's out here and all like "hey guys, this is what I'm planning on doing."

Plans

2010-08-01T15:45:00.003+08:00

There are two different ways I go about my writing: Planned and unplanned. Basically, a planned piece of writing has a lot of thought put into plot, characters, meaning, that sort of thing, you know, so it's all cohesive. My unplanned efforts are, of course, more spontaneous, more experimental, and more prone to failure. I usually have trouble planning large projects. Sometimes I lose interest, sometimes they just suck, and sometimes they just fall through.

My latest proposal is a little less strenuous than a NaNoWriMo type 50k-in-30-days ordeal, but rather, a 20k novella over the next three months. August, September, October. Then on to NaNoWriMo 2010 (perhaps I'll try writing my JulNoWriMo story again).

So anyway, here's the plan:
I'll have my first draft finished by August 20. That's 1,000 words a day for 20 days, not too hard, considering it'll be alongside uni and work, it's not an insurmountable task. My idea at the moment is an Epistolary narrative of a guy who starts keeping a dream diary when he starts having vivid dreams which are actually sections of a continuous dream from the mind of a young boy in a coma. The working title is "Perpetual Dreaming".

Continuing on the target of 1,000 words a day, I'll go through and rewrite the story, aiming to finish by September 9.

Then I'll spend the rest of September spending time on the weaker parts of the story, tightening the narrative up. That gives me 21 days, three weeks. My third draft, of sorts.

That leaves a full 31 days to spend on editing, going through the whole thing with a fine-toothed comb. I'll probably try to go through it all as early in October as I can, so I can sit on it for a few weeks before giving it one last look-over in the last week of October before submitting it for publication in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

I've been meaning to send something to that magazine since I came across it, but I haven't been able to get a working narrative up and ready. I came back to their site the other day, read through the guidelines again, saw their word limit was 20,000, and I thought I'd take up the opportunity to produce something a bit more ambitious than a simple short story.

I'm also going to send a short story to the Wet Ink magazine by the end of August, so, fingers crossed that all goes well. I'm starting semester two of year two at Uni tomorrow, where I'll be studying writing for performance and experimental writing, amongst other things. Hopefully I'm going to have a busy few months ahead of me.

Haiku: Ur doin it rong.

2010-07-30T19:17:00.000+08:00

I am the scarecrow,
the tin man, and the lion,
all rolled into one.

STC and the withering manuscript

2010-07-25T23:14:00.003+08:00

He sat at his desk and saw his manuscript for what it was; a series of concentric circles. They're about something, but at the moment, that something is just black lines going nowhere. He listened to music to see if something would inspire, if something would click. It didn't. He tried writing poetry, to take his mind off of things. Nothing. And the days fell away so fast. He found himself clinging to the half-way marker, unwilling to reach for more words, to tip the manuscript over, to spill the words into something more rounded, more balanced, more complete. He looked over the scattered pages, and with less than seven days before his goal dried up, he came to terms with the fact that he wouldn't reach his goal. No novel. Not this time around.

"Maybe," he thought, "I could make a novella out of it. There's time for that yet."
In a world where nothing is certain, he could only hope that bringing his target down would bring his story to an end. It was hard enough starting the thing, with only two characters vaguely identified at the time of the manuscript's conception, and with a plot clutching at a beginning, let alone a middle and end, the challenge was never going to be easy. But when the first draft is done, then his real work will begin. Then the characters will come to life. Then the plot will resonate from within. Then the manuscript will blossom from a scattered and incomprehensible novella into the novel it was meant to be.

Good luck, STC, you've still got a very long way to go. Hang in there.

Some of my best friends are strangers

2010-07-23T21:49:00.000+08:00

May I help you,
sir?

May I take
your order,
sir?

May I give you
what you ask,
what you ask of me,
sir?

May I offer
unparalleled value,
and unparalleled service,
and unparalleled flavour,
sir?

Here is your
change,
sir.

May you enjoy
your meal,
your drink,
and have a pleasant day,
sir.

Will you take me up on my offer?

Can I help you,
sir?

Can I straighten
your tie,
sir?

Can I fix
your shoe laces,
and button your shirt for you,
sir?

Tell me about
your sordid affairs,
your stressful finances,
your unfulfilled home life,
sir.

Give me
your attitude,
sir.

May you enjoy
this moment,
with me,
as much as I have with you,
sir.

Take the damn order and have a nice day.

Next.

Novel Excerpt

2010-07-13T22:35:00.002+08:00

We pulled up outside the hangar and got out of the car. And I could hear the loud murmuring of conversation competing with conversation. This was a gathering. Gabriel popped the boot. Blindfolded. Gagged. Bound arms and legs. This was Penny. But I'll get into the details later. He lifted her over his shoulder, her short brown hair falling and masking her face.
“Can you get the boot there?” Gabriel called out to me, walking towards the hangar.
I pushed it shut and I looked over at the girl slung over his shoulder, her hair bobbing with each step. I thought of the police, combing the car for evidence. I imagined a group of them pouring across every square millimetre of surface. Finding nothing, finding nothing, finding nothing. Then reaching the boot. A strand of hair. Hers. A set of fingerprints. Mine. A maze of little lines mirroring my own sitting clear as day on the boot. I rubbed the boot where I pushed it down with my sleeve. I didn't want this guy as my enemy. I jogged after him towards the hangar.

I've been reading through my novel sort of as I write it. Like, I'll print out each page as I write it and take it into work and read through what I've written at work. I think this is my favourite paragraph of the novel thus far. Could be a potential opening paragraph (yes, although it is currently in chapter 6, I'm more than comfortable with the fact that nothing is concrete at the moment). I also think it represents the sort of stylised horror that I'm aiming for. Quirky. Bizzare. Because it's not straight up horror, and I think I really need to sort out in the redrafting and editing processes how I want that balance to sit. Because I want it to be as much about character as about plot. That's probably why there's a lot of dialogue in my novel so far. Like, A LOT. I should probably cut down on that a lot and flesh the scenes out more. I guess that's why I like this paragraph. But, you know, it's a work in progress and it's got a long way to go. I'd like to think that people will read my writing and go "that kid's not normal." I'd like that. Because everything else about me is pretty much normal. Or even more normal than normal. Paler-shade-of-grey normal. But, you know, the plan with writing this book is to raise a few eyebrows and maybe suggest a few things. Still figuring out the details though.

88mph

2010-07-08T20:20:00.004+08:00

Where we're going we don't need time. Well... time in the linear sense of the word. I'm a measly five-and-a-half thousand words into my JulNo novel Utopia Ltd and I just want to shake it on its head to make all the change fall out of its pockets. I know for a fact that when I write it I will be starting at a different point in time. I just don't know where. At the moment, everything feels on the whole, too linear. When I finish the draft, I'm probably going to cut the story and print it in chapters and do a massive reshuffle of things.

When I first thought of the idea for this novel I wanted to write it about what goes on inside my head, the main character going through an identity chrisis works through his issues which are not too dissimilar to my own. While this may be interesting enough, I did what I always do when things sound like they might put my readers to sleep (my readers, lol), I chuck a bunch of fucking guns in there and see what happens. To make things exciting.

Now it feels like I've got two narratives going on in the one novel, and it's my goal to weave them together. The primary one (primary being more immediately identifiable) is the events of the armed robbery and the rather exciting [insert spoilers here] that follow. The secondary narrative is the one mentioned earlier, the main character's internal anxieties and identity struggles (as externalised through the presence of his psychologist) and his working through that.

I feel like the more I think about it, the more it changes and evolves and grows, and, to some extent, the less capable I am for writing the crazy fucking thing. And now I'm wanting to start at the end and toss the reader around like a ragdoll throughout the jumble of events that occur, giving them a chaotic, yet progressive journey as to how things got to be so out of proportion. I'll get there eventually. I'm actually hoping that once the draft is done, and once I cut it down to chapters and mess about with the ordering of events, I can treat the chapters more like short stories and brush up on the draft, edit through as if it were essentially a novel of short stories.

Fingers crossed I can get into a rhythm where the following forty-four-and-a-half thousand words just click into place. It's definitely been an interesting challenge going into July with minimal preparation (November last year I had character descriptions, locations and whole chapters mapped out before I started officially writing).

All Is Full Of Love

2010-07-06T11:19:00.000+08:00

You were made for each other.
You two, so perfectly fitting together
impossible to tell
if you are a copy of her,
or if she is a copy of you.

You were meant to be together.
You two, with sweet voices
producing the perfect harmony,
a call and response, call and response,
that all is full of love.

What's wrong with this picture?
Nothing, you say in unison.
Nothing is wrong.
This is perfect.
This is love.

You were happy with each other.
You two, singing your love
so proud and strong and clear.
But heads turn,
those who have never known your love.

You were built from the fires
of original sin.
You do not kiss and touch
and hold and love
without these judging eyes.

What's wrong with this picture?
Your love is not true or pure,
your love is not real.
You are lesbionic,
you are void of humanity.

You were taught to love,
to feel it and express it
for another so 'unnatural'.
You are beautiful, sweet machine,
it is a tragedy to be so unloved by so many.

Please teach us to love as you do.

Utopia Ltd

2010-07-05T19:43:00.000+08:00

Chapter 1: Fifteen Minutes at Gunpoint

Andy Warhol would be turning in his grave, if only he knew what this culture was calling 'art' now. Turning and turning and turning and turning. Art is just another form of advertisement. It's a way of artists expressing their thoughts and ideas on canvas. It's immortalised as a still image of one person's thoughts at a particular marker in time. Replace artists with corporate advertisers and the whole world becomes a canvas. Through artists, companies could buy space, they could manipulate people, they could project their ideas through artists onto walls, onto billboards, anywhere and everywhere physically possible, and it would seem as if these ideas were projected straight into our minds.

“Do you know why you're here?” The question lingered in my mind. Does he mean here-in-this-room or here-in-this-world? I would think a shrink would know better, but I've been disappointed by greater things before.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good.” He ruffled his hands through his hair and sat down at his desk. “Because I don't want to give you the impression that you've 'got issues' or that you're a delusional psychopath needing urgent medication.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “But that's not to say that I don't have issues, right? I mean, I'm familiar with your type. Preying on the insecure. Convincing people that they have serious psychological problems. Charging a hundred and thirty five bucks an hour to make the problems go away.”
He raised his eyebrow and stared at me for a moment, before saying “I can assure you that I'm not that type of psychologist. After all, I work for the Utopia Corporation, I don't work for individual clients.”
“So you're going to tell me what Utopia wants you to tell me and then send me on my way?”
“No, no, no. Not at all! While I am under their employment, my relationship with them is strictly professional. They hire me to do my job, and to do it properly. They hired me to check your mental well-being, and that's what we're here for. My results are not influenced by who I work for.”
“Ok,” I said. I sat down in the armchair opposite his desk.
“Right off the bat I'd say you're an anxious and sceptical individual, but I'm certainly not going to try to convince you of any problems that aren't there.”
I nodded.

“For this first session,” he said, “I just want you to settle in. I'm not going to try to probe your mind for now. Just relax, talk if you want, we might run through a simple test or two, but for today, we're going to keep things easy.” He leaned on his desk conversationally, to indicate that I had his full attention.
“No notepads?” I asked.
He held up his hands, “No notepads.”
“No recorders?”
He nodded, “No recorders. My time is yours.” His shirt had a slogan on it which read 'CHARLIE BROWN CAN GO SUCK A LEMON'. It made no sense to me, which, I believe was the entire point. I imagine a lot of people have forgotten who this Charlie Brown character is, but I certainly couldn't figure out what lemons had to do with anything.
“Ok,” I said, “so the robbery-”
“Later, later, later. We can talk about that later. I get the impression that you just want to work through this and be done with it. Everything we do here is necessary, I can grant you that. I need to take my time to do my job. Please, ease up. You're so anxious.”
I gulped. “Ok,” I repeated. “I like your office.” I rubbed the arms of the chair. Leather. “It's nice.”
“Thank you,” he said. “It's a bit messier than I'd like it, but it works for me.”
“Sure,” I said. I took note of the large textbooks on psychology that were spilling from the bookshelf. Entire textbooks dedicated to the Rorschach test and to dream analysis and other psychological methods.
“Do you like reading?” he asked when he saw me staring at 'Advanced Psychoanalysis', sitting on the corner of his desk.
“Sure,” I said, “fiction, mostly.”
“Great, great.” He smiled, and I couldn't be sure what he was thinking.

It was like a dance. A great ugly ballet for people tip-toeing around the meat of the show. We were there to talk about the robbery, and, to be honest, it was painful trying to keep it at the back of my mind.

“What's with the shirt?” I asked.
He smiled again, this time with a genuine personality behind his face. “I saw it at a market. Loved it, bought it, wearing it.”
Tah-dah.
“Cool,” I said. “What does it mean, though, 'Go suck a lemon', what is that?”
“Oh, you know, it's just something that'll get the Peanuts collectors all riled up.”
“I didn't think people still read Peanuts, let alone collected them.”
“No. Not many at all. But Charles Schultz is decomposing and I'm still wearing this shirt.”
I stared at him. At the shirt with the slogan. At the cartoon Snoopy below, posing with the one-fingered-salute. Real nice.
“I know,” he said, “I know. I've got issues.”
I gaped.
“Hey,” he said, “I'm a shrink, I can deal with it.”
Was this guy being serious?
“When you've been in my line of work for a few years you start to believe that everyone's got issues of some form or another.”
“Do I have issues?”
“Definitely.”
I waited for him.
“You're anxious. You're not sure what to think of me because we haven't talked about anything significant yet. You think I'm acting quite unprofessional, and that makes you nervous. You feel like you need confirmation from me. You need my approval, not because of who I am, but because of the qualifications I have. You need my professional opinion in order to convince yourself that you're 'normal'. I think this is something you've had problems with for years, you seek out approval and acceptance. You're paranoid.”

This guy. With the brass name plate on his desk, 'Bernard Shepard', and the diploma on the wall. This guy. With the fuck-Schultz shirt, and the 'everybody's paranoid' theory. This guy. Reaches into his drawer for his packet of cigarettes, and I thought he was reaching for a gun.

What would McJesus do?

2010-06-29T22:02:00.003+08:00

So, I find myself again at the start of another novel. I say that like I've written quite a few myself. Well, I'm sure as hell no Stephen King, in fact I've only finished one novel draft to date. With two other drafts kind of stuck somewhere in my pile of fiction I've started but probably will never finish. I'm ok with that, I've come to terms with that. I've changed as a writer, even from November last year (when I wrote my first novel).

So, what have I got planned this time around? Well, basically, all I've got at the moment is a bunch of ideas. Think of those ideas as those balls in the lotto machines, flying about in their chaos and confusion, contained in their clear sphere, waiting for the vacuum hose to come up and pick a number. I've got a couple of starting places, which I'm using as a launching pad of sorts for my other ideas. I've got my themes that I want to write about, and I've got my fingers crossed that it comes together well enough. Needless to say, I put a lot more time and effort into planning my novel in November, although I feel like this one has the potential to mean something, as opposed to existing merely as a juvenile form of entertainment.

One thing I've been able to do lately through poetry is tackle issues relevant to my life, to me personally. As a socially insecure individual, I think that having that outlet in my life is simply just wonderful, even if people read it out of context, butcher its grammar, it's still got that meaning to me. The next logical step would be to channel that strong connection from poetry into prose.

To be honest, this prospect is a little frightening to comprehend. It's not another "mankind's selfishness has doomed us all" sort of gothic horror that I have been drawn towards in the past, but a chance to go back to the issues I had in my childhood, and how they trickled on into the more grown-up me. I knew it was never going to be as easy as 'hey, let's go dig up some undead skeletons in my closet and hit them with a shovel a few times!', but essentially, that's what I want to do.

My story will most likely take place in a hyper-commercialised world (thus, the McJesus in the blog title) and starts with an armed robbery. Basically, I just wanted to stir up a shitstorm right from the get-go so I could spend most of the time just exposing and exposing the main character (he's a sort of fictionalised me at this point), and I'll explore what it means to have an identity within such a heavily commodified culture and how that can impact an individual on a psychological level. This is where all my literary and cultural studies at uni will come in handy.

JulNoWriMo is coming up very soon, and I'm probably WAY under-prepared, but I'm excited. It's something I'd write for my ten-year-old self, and I feel like it's very necessary that I go away from genres such as sci-fi and fantasy that are typically seen as forms of 'escapism'. I don't want to escape anything, I want to confront those childhood skeletons and get some much needed closure, which I feel I haven't fully done yet, but, yeah. I need this.

All I've Written

2010-06-16T23:01:00.002+08:00

So I haven't really had much to say on here lately. Now that I've finished my first semester of my second year at uni I can get back to prioritising some of my writing goals. I handed in my last assignment on Monday and I feel like I've achieved a credit with my worst class. All my assignments, save for one, a solid credit, have been distinctions or higher. Feels good.

But now that uni's over it feels like all I can really do is work, write and read. Got a couple of things going on, but for the majority of the break, I'll probably just be couped up in my home, learning more about myself through my writing.

Today I went through everything I've written over the past two and a half years, basically, since I started writing as a hobby, just making sure I had all my finished short stories/poems printed out, as well as the draft to my one finished novel, and the odd chapters of the couple of unfinished novels. I think I counted about 230 odd pages. Flicking through the file I now have for my writing, I have written 13 poems, 4 flash fictions, 22 short stories, 1 short film script, 1 radio play, 1 chapter of a novel, 2 chapters of another novel, and 1 complete novel. I also wrote a 10,000 word journal over the course of the past 3-4 months for one of my uni courses, which has the potential for quite a few more stories, however, out of what I've listed here, if you asked me to pick out the ones that I thought were genuinely outstanding, I'd forget about most of them and struggle with the remaining handful.

Yeah, I've started probably 4 or 5 (probably more) novels over the past couple of years, but at the moment, I'm at a struggle to see any merit in them. I guess my units have changed how I write fiction. Certainly, my poetry and short fiction have improved greatly. The stuff that I wrote a couple of years ago that I thought was quite good, now just feels quite average, and I think it was because back then I was writing primarily to entertain people. I was seeing writing as a form of entertainment, just a casual hobby to throw around for people to enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that, but I guess I look at books like Twilight, I guess that's an example that a lot of people can relate to, and I wonder about the meaning behind it. What was the meaning behind my gothic horror shorts? I guess with my Literary and Cultural Studies units I've been able to understand how some texts go beyond the simple pleasure of 'novel=entertainment' and attempt to actually say something entirely larger about class or race or gender or whatever.

I read Fight Club for the second time this semester, and watched the film for I think the fourth time. I learned a lot regarding gender that I didn't wholly understand the first time reading it through, and I find that it's very much a part of why I identified with it as much as I did. It's about questioning the dominant ideologies of man, it's about renegotiating the self and attempting to renegotiate your expectations with society. That's the sort of thing I'd like to get into my writing. I don't want to be someone who writes something purely for the sake of giving people something entertaining to read. I want to be someone who writes something that really makes a statement. It doesn't have to be as in-your-face as Fight Club, but I'd like for something to be there, if that makes sense.

So anyway, all my older stuff is pretty much redundant in terms of that goal, and while I've talked about rewriting my novel, to make it more decent, more entertaining, I feel there's nothing really there at this point in time, and I'd rather just start over with something completely new. A new novel. New ideas. A novel that's about something. I've had a recent idea about a sci-fi short story, and one thing that's kept me from writing sci-fi for a while was because when I write it, it feels so bland and empty. But hopefully, this short story is able to say what I want to say, and maybe even extrapolate out into a novel.

I don't know. In a few years time, I'll probably be questioning everything I've done up until that point like I am now, and I'll feel like I'm just running in circles.

Water on the Engine

2010-06-13T01:05:00.003+08:00

Utopia for seahorses,
who know no better than their brothers
as to what monstrosity sleeps in their waters.

Used and abused on the surface,
used and abused, and taken away.
And the last air bubbles rose and blistered
many, many years ago.

The Aztecs were its little brother,
the Egypts, its little sister.
The whole ocean belonged in its pocket,
the earth, a pearl plucked from its hand,
so young and supple and pure.

A nation-state of dreamers
with the resources
to take, take, take away
and make the truly beautiful
truly terrifying to behold.

They built the cold metal shells
of children stolen from the earth
and moulded into slaves,
abominations to the life-blood of the world.

Still now, I feel the shudder,
I feel the quivering anger
of an earth abused,
a crucial counterpoint
which sent it sliding from their clutches,
down, down, down.

It sits like an algae-coated castle
in a fishtank in the ocean,
it means nothing,
a utopia for seahorses
so forgotten in the deep.

Out of sight, it sits restlessly waiting,
it tries to warn us of our fate,
of our future beside it on the ocean floor
where the truly terrible
can become beautiful again.

-------------

It feels good to write something that isn't for uni. This is a poem I whipped up tonight, and so I assume if you're reading this you've read the poem, so I can talk about stuff that might skew your perception before reading the poem. Like how this poem is about the lost city of Atlantis. If you knew that at the start, the imagery would be lost, and so, the target I've set out for in this poem is for people reading the poem to figure it out on their own, which I hope you did. The other thing I'm doing is juxtaposing the ancient myth with present day society and the whole over-reliance on technology. It's quite ironic that I've written it and distributed it via technological media, but that's a whole other thing. Another matter I'd like to address is the title. I wrote it before I'd fully figured out the meaning of the poem, and I tought maybe "Deus ex Machina" would be a better title, what with it being a literal translation to "God of the machine", meaning nature having more stability and reliability than technology. I don't know, would that work? Better/worse?

Hi how are you

2010-05-16T20:42:00.002+08:00

It has been a while since I've had something to say here, which in itself can say a lot of things. I'm still writing, but very conservatively. Uni has definitely affected how and what I write. In some cases it seems stifling, but in other cases it seems all for the better, take the time to write something real. I haven't had any publications this year, but I haven't been trying all that hard, to be honest. As always, study and work wind up cutting my creative writing time down to a minimum, and with my music hobby running around in the picture now (although, admittedly, not a MAJOR, major time kill), my time for writing is shrinking more and more as I approach the semester's end. No doubt I'll have a few stories ready for publication here and there by the end of the year, and I'll probably look at some poetry too. Depending on how well I go next year, I may even look into doing something with scripts, although I'll sort that hurdle out when I come to it. I've been told I'm pretty good with dialogue, and I recieved good marks for my scriptwriting last year, but I think a unit dedicated solely to scriptwriting/screenplays should really put me under the pump. I'm looking forward to my second NaNoWriMo, which, I know, is A LONG way away, but with all that I've learned this year, it should definitely be interesting. I'm not sure whether rewriting last year's novel (of which I've already written out some notes) is the way to go, or whether I'll strip things back in terms of plot, and go for a more character driven piece that's more innovative than a generic steampunk epic. Anyways, I think I've achieved something with my latest short story, particularly with character development and plot structure, which I'll spend the next few weeks workshopping. It would have been good to have a few more short stories under my belt by now (even a few more GOOD ones), but I guess I'm going alright.

Worm

2010-04-12T22:40:00.002+08:00

So today I was in a moment of self-reflectivity. I do that sort of shit a lot. I was in that moment, and I was thinking, Shane, buddy boy, ol' buddy ol' pal, if you could sum your life up in one word, just one word, what would it be? And I thought about this, and I didn't really think for long before I found a word that stuck. Sure, chivalrous would have been a decent word. Sure, intelligent would have been pretty neat. Sure, I may freely admit to being those things and many others, but it doesn't really embody me in my entirety, I don't think of me when I think of those words. Maybe slivers of my personality, fractions of the whole, but nothing complete. And I suppose that sort of thinking has got me to where I am, and it got me to this one word. Segmented. I think many people are like this in the modern world we live in, but I find it really rings true for me. I think of segmented and I think of worms, segmented worms. And I remember "studying" them in primary school. The " " around studying because I don't exactly consider the learnings of primary school to be anything as laborous as study. To me study is high school, it's further education. In primary school, you learn, you observe, you practice. It's only in the years following that you analyse, that you pick apart for yourself, that you get in on the details and you study. In a way, my self-reflective personality turned the scalpel on myself, the segmented worm, and I counted the rings (hooray for conflicting metaphors!)

Yes, I am a segmented being. I am this, I am that, I am the other. I take snippets from here or there and I store useless bits of information and temporarily forget the vital ones. I have multiple personalities, although I'm usually just stuck on "sunny disposition" (much to the dismay of others, I'm sure). There are many facets to my life, and I'm always changing my decisions and shifting over to another segment, never really having one primary focus. Although I'm very much a person split into pieces, they're all connected (although rather obscurely), and, I would like to say, they're all moving forward.

Yours truly,
Shane the Segmented Worm.

Poetic Sputtering... to a halt.

2010-03-31T21:56:00.002+08:00

Last poetry battle and my word is NEEDS

Needs watering, the flowers,
Keep up the appearances,
What would they think,
Should they see the real you?

Elimy's first word was YOU. I thought it was fitting to bring things around full circle. This poem is about the masks people wear to pretend they're someone else. It's been fun messing about with these little daily poems. Maybe again sometime in the future?

Poemastic Fantastic

2010-03-30T19:42:00.003+08:00

My word is YOU

You, with the dog eyed soul,
And watery eyes,
You, with the heart of coal,
And transparent lies.

Elimy's word is LIES.

Poetry-Schmoetry

2010-03-29T12:21:00.002+08:00

Today's word is BLUE

Blue cheeks spread on cold pale flesh,
Your face is victim to the cold,
Wild white wind is winter fresh,
Your gloves, your hands, have warmth, to hold.

Elimy's word is HOLD. Happy birthday Elimy!

Poetrology 101

2010-03-28T16:41:00.003+08:00

Because I was at work and because I was at a party, and becuase I was drunk and tired when I got home I didn't do a poem yesterday. That means this is the second one today! Woo, go me! My word is "Flight".

Flight for flightless birds I wish
could take to skies in herds to fish
for dreams to feed their hearts with hope
enough to bring the world awake, to stir you from your coma.

Elimy's word is COMA. Yes I know, this poem is more like five lines squashed into four, but whatever.

Poemisms Continued

2010-03-28T09:44:00.002+08:00

Today's word: Perfection

Perfection is a collection of the hues of gray,
The scope that stifles and chokes us of what we feel,
A flaw is a splash of raw colour a much more vibrant display,
More beautiful, much more colourful, and infinitely more real.

Thanks Elimy, your word is: REAL

Poetramatic Attack!

2010-03-26T16:49:00.003+08:00

My poem battle number 3. Elimy has set me up with the word "Hierarchy".

Hierarchy of shoes and dresses,
Plastic dolls and pop princesses,
This soulless dream, to make a buck,
You need to learn to bend your knees and suck.

Whether metaphorical or literal, I think the message in this poem is pretty clear, although I'm sure my methods may be slightly objectionable. ;)

Elimy's word is: SUCK
Ha, ha, ha. This is fun.

PS: What typo?

More Poemetrics

2010-03-25T17:36:00.002+08:00

Elimy's got me writing a poem begining with the word "Underpants"

Underpants fold, roll and tumble in the dryer,
Fresh for the cold winter's day,
Nothing could be more comfortable.

Elimy's word is: COMFORTABLE

Poetry Battle

2010-03-24T17:15:00.003+08:00

I'm battling Elimy (http://elimy.blogspot.com/) in the fine art of poetry and this is my response to her poem titled "Love".

Rules:
1) Each poem must begin with the final word of the poem of the person before.
2) Each poem can only be two to four lines long (although line length will not be standardized).
3) Cliches are punishable by death.
4) Poems must be relevant... no A-grade baloney.
5) No personal attacks on the other poet.

Bread:

Bread, bread, the stuff in your head,
Pickled in brain-juice, all soggy and red,
And the mould that is growing and eating your head,
Will scrape at your skull until you're deceased.

Elimy's word is: Deceased.

Things people do for attention

2010-03-16T00:05:00.002+08:00

This is the motivation for a lot of my writings of late. What will people do before people will pay attention to them? What will they have to do before people stop to help? It's mostly pretty gloomy stuff, but it's really allowed me to explore characters on an individual level. I just feel like I need to work with this idea through the different situations before I hit one that fits. Maybe this is a good style/theme for me, as I'm not usually the centre of attention. I'm not usually one to talk about my problems and live with my emotions so close to the surface. I usually find that the impression this gives is that I'm quite level-headed, quite regular, balanced, and all that. I figure most of these ideas come from assumptions. I think lots of things I don't say. I'm one of those people who thinks a lot before saying things. Most of the time, anyway. I calculate words. I decide what I want to share about myself. I'm reserved, if you could put just one word to me. What will I do for attention? I honestly don't know. Sometimes I feel like the way I articulate myself is a show in which I manipulate people to see me a certain way, but I know I couldn't be that devious on a conscious level. Maybe all I want, as a writer, and as a person too, I guess, is for people to listen to me. I don't know.

First week back at uni

2010-03-07T17:56:00.002+08:00

Just a bit of general housekeeping. I am back at Curtin for my second year of Creative Writing/Literary and Cultural Studies. I'm studying poetry and short fiction this semester, as well as some literary and cultural stuff, including a course on popular music. I get to do a presentation on Fight Club at the end of the semester, which I'm really psyched about, and as I get back into the rhythm of things I'm picking up the pen a bit more frequently, and trying to read through a couple of novels when I can. I have been reading "The War in Heaven" by David Zindell, which is absolutely fantastic, but it's not something you can read in snapshots, like on a bus or on your lunchbreak. So I've put that aside for the time being (hopefully not for too long this time!) and instead I've picked up another of Chuck Palahniuk's novels, Survivor.

I've read Fight Club, and I'm about forty pages into Survivor, and I must say that I'm drawn to this man's knack for writing prose. He writes "differently" to your average New Your Best-Seller, and I think that really makes a difference, and really makes his writing pop out. In studying the more minute techniques of narrative, I hope that I can follow Chuck towards this path of literary originality. I know it sounds ironic, trying to achieve originality through the following of others. But I think it works for me. I'd like to think my stories can offer something different to my readers.

This difference, however, has its downfalls. You see, when people read, they expect to be entertained, and the conundrum lies with reverting expectations and still remaining entertaining and compelling. I think people look for generic hooks and tropes, and when they're not there, or portrayed differently, it is harder for the reader to accept the story as it is, or fully understand what I, as the author have tried to do. At the moment, I'm really trying to push my prose into a metaphoric state. I tried to get my latest story "Painting Flames on Runaway Trains" to pace itself like that of a runaway train, gathering momentum until the penultimate crash.

I'm not entirely sure how to approach my next project. I've just been running through ideas before I go to bed, jotting down the core themes I'd like to get at, and how I could approach them. So far, all I can say is that it's about an astronaut that is abandoned on the surface of Mars and left to contemplate his abandonment without a soul to communicate with.

My poetry tutor, Brian Dibble, said in my first class that poetry was metaphorical, but prose is metonymical. Maybe it's just me, but I think the metaphoric and metonymic natures of either two forms are interchangeable. I prefer my poetry to be grounded in the real world, whereas I like to give my prose metaphoric qualities, particularly in the rhythms of the sentences I use. Repetition, patterns, words that roll off the tongue like poetry, without actually being poetry. I like to get inside the heads of characters, to explore into what makes them tickin my prose. I like to stand back and observe things as they are in my poetry. I like to think that playing around with these two art forms has taught me a lot, and ultimately, unlocked my ability to tap into ideas I previously thought impossible. My first story was a gothic horror, it goes through the usual themes and expresses things that have been expressed over and over again. I like to think I can move on to more interesting, deeper stuff. I only hope it will be read and enjoyed as it is.

So, yeah, my first week has been good, nothing outstanding, going to try to get on top of my homework tonight and ready myself for week two. I don't know what this Mars story will end up like, but as a writer, and as a person, I like to think that life is flexible. You can bend it and conform it to your will, and likewise, it can be so warped that you won't know what the future will hold for you, whether it be a year or a month or a day. Things just are the way they are and you've got to just run with it and hope you end up where you want, or somewhere just as good.

Painting Flames on Runaway Trains

2010-02-23T00:03:00.000+08:00

Painting Flames on Runaway Trains

I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. I hated that apartment. Like the bag with the busted zipper and the hole in the bottom. The bag that I couldn't ditch because I couldn't afford a new bag, let alone a new apartment. I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. And I knew that I couldn't take it another night.

In the cold light of morning, the grey nothing sunlight that spilled through the torn curtains told me that the train was coming. I knew the pillow over my head wouldn't work. I knew the earmuffs wouldn't work. I knew there weren't enough sleeping pills in the world to keep me from the blistering racket of the train tearing across the tracks. That's a lie, but there weren't enough sleeping pills short of suicide that would help me. The temptation to down a whole bottle came and went, but I might have just put a bullet through my head for what it was worth.

The dark rings around my eyes had garnered me the nickname 'Panda', even though that was where the similarities ended. Right on time, the train ran past my apartment and magnified my ever present migraine. I had the glass of water sitting on the bedside table and the pills in the drawer. Two tablets of paracetamol, two of aspirin. These were my breakfast pills, and I chugged them down. Each day I found myself receding into my own lethargy. The dark rings grew deeper and darker and more resolute. And I found my mind balanced on a knife's edge, between raging madness and bitter resentment. I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for the blade to tip one way or the other. I tongued around my mouth for the bitter residue that lingered from the pills. I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. And I took my pills, and I began to wonder if I slept at all. The dark rings appeared to grow exponentially and take on a wider spectrum of colours. From the grey droopy sacks beneath my eyes grew deeper, more distinct hues. Blue, violet, black. And my eyes flushed red with tiny angry blood vessels shaped like tiny angry lightning bolts. I saw this in the mirror in the bathroom every morning.

“Good morning Panda.” I said to the mirror as I drowned myself in deodorant that smelled more like fly spray. I drowned myself in the basin filled with cold water, I let it fill my nostrils and mouth until I coughed and spluttered and pulled my head from the basin with a violent jerk. I almost broke something. A towel rail, a set of scales, an arm, or a leg, I didn't know. But I just stumbled back against the bathroom wall, taking whooping breaths that sounded not unlike a broken vacuum cleaner. This was the only way I knew how to truly wake myself from this dull stupor, this constant sub-consciousness, this madness in limbo between the living and dead.

That morning I knew I had to make changes. I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. And I didn't care what went wrong any more. I was sick of this shit, this dead end life in my apartment too close to the tracks. I pulled the two gas cans from under my bed and splashed the liquid over the bed, the table, the floor, the walls. The bathroom, the kitchen. The dining room, the lounge room. The hallway. It wasn't long before the petrol was all I could smell. It coated the place, it left its pungent stench wherever I went, it left its greasy shine on the walls and on my hands. After this, I thought to myself, no going back.

The red head match in my hand trembled. Everything I owned and despised so much was in this apartment. Everything that felt to me like a whole lot of nothing. I was not nervous or afraid, no. I was excited. I rubbed the beautiful red head against the outside of the matchbox gingerly, gently. This was peace. The calmest I'd been in years. In years. I lit the match and flicked it to the floor. I didn't even look back.

The fire crackled and licked the flaking wallpaper into delicate coils of charcoal black, and the flames ate away at my furniture, and the smoke smouldered beneath the closed front door. Within minutes it would all be black, ready to be torn up and thrown out and sanded down, ready to accept a new life with open arms, ready to crush the unsuspecting new occupant like a butterfly. Life in the apartment would repeat itself. Repeat itself. Repeat itself. Like the others before me, I was glad to be rid of the place. No strings attached, no questions, no awkward snags to tug me back the moment I tasted the freedom.

At that time I thought I had burned everything away. I came to realise that it never ends. There was always the slow madness. There were always the rings around my eyes. There were always strings. In truth the thrill and excitement filled me with a satisfaction that lasted only as long as water in a leaking bucket. It was a hollow victory. There was still the bitter taste of the pills in my mouth and there was still the rank smell of petrol and fly-spray deodorant on my skin and clothes. I was a wanderer. I could go where I wanted and do what I pleased, although I felt void of purpose. But the first thing that I did was walk as far from the train tracks as my legs would take me. That night I slept on a trampoline. That night I actually slept.

I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. The train. I reached for my glass of water, on the drawer with my pills, but I only grabbed springs. I hadn't been dreaming the fire and I certainly hadn't been dreaming the trampoline. I had, however, been dreaming the train. I could have downed a bottle of sleeping pills there and then if I had them. I thought it was just an afterthought of the years of torture, that it would fade away with time. I gave it another week. I woke up again, to the sound of the train again. Again and again and again. I was getting some sleep, that was certainly an improvement. But nothing could rescue the dark rings or the red veins that haunted my eyes. And through the ringing in my ears from the constant clacking of the faraway morning train, I began to wonder whether the train was ever real?

I knew there had probably been many people sifting through my apartment, trying to find the source of the fire, the reason. I thought a week was a good enough buffer to chance returning to the area. I had spent so long deprived of sleep, I needed to see the tracks for myself as validation before I could start figuring out how to remove them from my mind. It was dread that I felt on the walk back to my apartment. I felt like I was running along a narrow path and there was a fork up ahead, but but I was blinded by doubt and delusion. I tried to remember those fatigued years that slipped through my fingers, the fence behind my house, and the razor wire forming large hoops all across the top. I clutched to the fence with my fingers and pushed my face up against it. And there was the railway gravel, the steel railing on timber sleepers, those wretched train tracks.

Yes, the tracks were real. Yes, the train was real. But I couldn't get on with my life until something was done. Even standing against the fence, even looking at the tracks, with no train in sight, I could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the wheels on the tracks and the high-pitch squeal of the friction between metal and metal. I reached for my water and my tablets again as a pain shot through my head, and I remembered where I was. The water was gone, the tablets were gone. I looked up to my apartment window where the walls were still charred black. I could smell the burning from the week before, and I could smell the burned petrol and the acrid black smoke that came with it. And I could also smell freshly mown grass. The lawnmower. I figured that was where the burned petrol smell was coming from, that I wasn't completely losing touch with reality. I followed the stench to the little garden shed, and the ideas ticked over in my head. Once, twice, three times, I struck on the shed door before it splintered inwards. I felt the ideas in my head begin to smoulder.

There, in the corner of the small shed, was the offending lawn mower, the motor still warm and the floor scattered with a loose trail of cut grass. The combination of petrol and grass smells in the cramped shed was dominating. It was a mess, shovels on the floor, trowels and secateurs scattered on the bench, even a little digging fork sticking out of the wall. There was a coil of hose in the corner that looked like something was nesting inside it. Then I heard some noises outside so I propped the shed door back against its frame. It must have been people talking in the front yard, because I couldn't see anything through the window, and no one came looking to see why the shed's door was resting askew.

I flicked the light switch on and I began looking around the shed for something I knew must be hidden in there. There were drawers and cupboards in that shed that looked like they hadn't been opened in years. Half-used tins of paint, dusty jars containing mystery items, power tools that had burned out aeons ago that had eventually made their way into the power tool graveyard in the toolbox in the shed. There were spider webs in almost every crevice. And there were plenty of spiders that were crawling around making still more webs while I searched, while I destroyed their delicate lace work. It was tucked away, deep in a cupboard which flaked paint from its surface like it was shedding skin. It was a fuel container for the mower. I slid it out from its spot on the bottom shelf, but as soon as I grabbed the handle, I knew it was empty.

I took the container with me anyway, and I left the shed door off its hinges and I walked out onto the street. I followed the path parallel to the tracks and I passed by house after house of what I assumed were filled with the same morning train torture that I was. The people living in those houses were unfortunate people. They were sick people. And I had to help them. When I saw the weather-worn red cottage across the street with the overgrown jungle for a garden, I knew it would be an easy house to steal from.
“Nothing personal”, I told myself. “What's one little act of breaking and entering to a lifetime of peace?”

I sat on a bench a little way down the road from the house, and I waited for the little rust-bucket car to pull out of the driveway. I stashed the fuel container beneath my feet and I waited patiently. I didn't have a watch, but judging the angle of the sun I guessed it was early afternoon when the car left. I felt the rush of adrenaline kick when the car drove out of sight. It was as if I were back at the fire again. Not nervous... excited. I didn't have any tools to assist me, but I didn't need them. I was superman, always there to serve and protect. I'd be in and out before anyone noticed, faster than a speeding train.

I walked up the dirt driveway past all the weeds that had taken over the front garden. The back garden was much the same. I started looking for rocks on the ground before I noticed the back door had been left open. It could have been that there was someone else in the house, or it could have been that there was nothing worth stealing in there. I had come this far, I just chose to believe the house was empty and I followed the stone steps up to the battered old fly wire door.
“I am superman” I whispered as I pulled the door outwards and stepped onto the tacky linoleum floor of the kitchen. In and out before anyone knows.

The house was empty, I could tell from the moment I walked in. There was the sound of the cat clock in the corner, and the almost silent hum of the fridge and freezer, but no television, no knitting needles, no voices or footsteps, nothing. From the moment I walked in, I felt like I knew everything about the woman that lived here. She lived alone, and she loved cats, but she could never own another after her last cat died. There were photographs of her with her cat, her fluffy white everything with the squashy toad-face that she loved regardless. There were cat plates and bowls and calendars and tea cups and a woollen, whiskered tea cosy, and I could be sure her doorbell would meow. It was the knife. I went there for the kitchen knife. It was in the second drawer below the regular cutlery. The long stainless steel blade, it was perfect. I slid it into my jacket pocket and left knowing that she wouldn't notice a thing. She'd notice a cat plate or a cat clock, but not a knife.

No looking back. I saw looking back as a sign of weakness, and I knew I was not going to crumble. The train station was only a few more kilometres away, and I could smell the end drawing nearer and nearer. I kept telling myself that I would be done with everything tonight. Not tomorrow, not maybe later... tonight. I just needed to fill my fuel container up and the plan would come into full swing. That proved to be little trouble at all. I stopped at the next gas station I came across and pumped the container full from bowser number one. The fuel was regular unleaded, although that didn't matter at all. I paid in shrapnel and left, no looking back.

My feet were sore and after a few more kilometres of carrying the full container my arm was aching too. But I wasn't going to stop, I wasn't going to let this madness get the better of me. I knew no one else on this damned street would do a thing, so I had no choice but to act for them. It was closing in on sunset when I came up to the train station. There was no-one. A guard or two, but the commuters were gone. I looked at the timetable and I looked at the giant clock on the wall. The train was due in five minutes.

I waited patiently, all the while noticing the glances the guards were giving me. There were no more trains leaving this station. There were no more trains scheduled to leave, to be more accurate. I waited my five minutes and the train came in empty. Perfect. I walked up to the driver's door at the front with my fuel container in one hand and I drew my knife out of my jacket with the other. The driver stepped out of the train, appearing to be relieved that his work day was over. The guards stepped forward and called something to me, or to the driver, I didn't really hear which, but I shoved the little uniformed man back on the train and locked the door. He sat slumped in the corner, whimpering like a baby, with wide eyes that refused to part with my knife but for a moment.
“How do you start this thing?” I asked.
He pointed a quivering finger at a lever. I slammed it forward as far as it would go, ignoring the guards hammering on the door and objecting my actions with violent threats.

The excitement was rising in me, and although the sound of the train roaring across the tracks almost split my head in two, I felt a thrill, an aliveness that neither the robbery nor the fire could match. I smacked the driver's head with my knife handle, hard enough to knock him out for a minute or two. I slid open the door to the rest of the carriage and I emptied my fuel container all across the floor and seats and graffiti covered windows. And then I lit the fire that engulfed the train. I threw the match and closed myself in the driver's cabin with the driver still resting on the floor. The track was probably a good sixty kilometres long, but I knew that wasn't going to last long at the speed we were going. It felt like only a few minutes before the train raced past my own apartment, and it wasn't long before the smoke began seeping in through the cracks in the door.

It wasn't the smoke that got to me first though, it was the heat. Most of the smoke was carried the other way, but the heat from the flames radiated through the walls and turned the cabin into a micro-sauna. Then came the wailing sirens of the police, and I'm sure the fire brigade and ambulance services weren't far behind. It was going to be death or prison for me. I'd come too far, I'd dreamed what others were too afraid to dream, I came so far that I couldn't turn back. I was on these tracks for good. No turning back.

They'd set up a blockade. I couldn't see what it was before I was on top of it. All I could see was the flashing lights and then something was caught in the wheels. Worse than the thrumming of the train on the tracks, the jammed wheels screamed a pitch that threatened to obliterate my eardrums. I didn't need to adjust a thing on the controls before the train jerked and lurched and started slowing down. Eventually, the train came to rest under the guidance of the jam. In the absence of the orchestra of nightmare sounds of the train, there was only the amplification of the police sirens. I heard the crunching of police footsteps on rail road gravel and the tinny sound of an authorised knock on the side of the train.

“Sir, you're going to have to come out of there with your hands raised” He said.
My excitement was gone. I wasn't sure what had happened, whether it was failure, or something else. I grabbed the train driver and unlocked the door.
I held the knife to his neck, now with my hands shivering from the nerves. “I've got a hostage.”
“Stay calm, sir. We're here to help you.”
Help. The word ran through my head like lightning. I let the knife slide from my grip. “Ok” I said. It was about fucking time.

Don't mind the trimmings/You should have read faster

2010-02-11T22:47:00.003+08:00

So, November 2009 was a long time ago. My 50,000 words of National Novel Writing Month have been up here since then. I've taken it down now (all except the first chapter), and I'm working on turning "In the Valley of the Tempest" into a saga. At the moment it's shaping up to be a quadrilogy.

I started writing the first novel of the series in an even more casual fashion than I did for the original in NaNoWriMo. With little planning. Bad mistake. Bad mistake. Since then I've been working on filling out the plot synopses for the books. I've done very brief chapter summaries for the first three books, and I should have the fourth done soon. To be honest, when I start talking about it, I get itching to get writing on it. But I also know that I'm a long way off being ready for take deux. I want something respectable, something publishable. And I know that won't happen overnight. So once the brief chapter synopses are done I'm going to work on character profiles, the world's geography, as well as notes on technology/economics/etc and other such things that'll enable me to keep everything consistent, which in turn will allow me to focus on other such items as a punchy plot and enriching character developments.

In my notes so far, it's all action plot. One/two lines of notes per chapter (probably about 10-20 pages). That's so I leave a lot of room for other important novel-driving issues. Basically, my novels follow the crew of one airship as they fly headfirst into a war between the civilised cities and the Tempest (aided by the many rebel camps/armies gathering). I'm yet to find the real motivating factor that'll stir up these high tensioned battlefields, but I know there'll be plenty of confrontation and conflict. Until I work everything out, I won't have a novel to work with, but it should all come together in my notes very soon, and I'll get the keyboard rolling words out by the thousands once again.

Look out for book one; "Stormbringer" in bookstores over the coming years. I know it's tough to 'make it' in the writing industry nowdays, but I've got two things I think I can hold to my advantage; confidence and persistence. I figure that if I can't even back myself, how am I to expect agents or publishers to bite at my literature?

A Note For Elizabeth

2010-02-07T21:09:00.000+08:00

A Note for Elizabeth

The streets of London were slicked with hardened ice, the sky was encased in a dome of storm clouds all day and all night. It had been like this for a few days now, and the families mostly kept to themselves. But the weather could hardly dampen their spirits, considering what time of year it was. Each house was decorated in crimson and emerald ornaments, each living room was home to small but fashionable Christmas trees. Even though the weather was the worst it had been in years, the spirit of Saint Nicholas was still shining strong. This was the norm of every house in London. Well, all except one. Mrs Welkes, and her eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth stood at their front window, gazing out into the darkened street, waiting for their beloved father to step over the threshold and greet them with warm smiles and open arms. They waited, but he did not arrive. They waited until the burning street lamp gave in to the cold outside, they could wait no more. They were disappointed, but not surprised by his absence.

Johnathon Welkes was a successful man, a scientist respected amongst scientists. He was also a busy man, and he regretted the times that his work interfered with his family time. But they understood. It was hard for Elizabeth, but she was a good girl, and she was very understanding, and mature for her age. She had a lot of her father's determination in her, and it tore John up inside to miss seeing her grow up. Elizabeth, like so many other children in the area, went to a boarding school to study. She only came home for holidays, which seemed to be the busiest time of the year for John. It was 10 days until Christmas, 15th December, 1933, and John was hard at work, trying his damnedest to finish his research so that he could be with his family on Christmas. He had promised Elizabeth that he would be there for her. And she was so overjoyed to have the opportunity, for she had not had a Christmas with her father since she was five years old. Although she knew deep down that her father might be too busy, she couldn't help but pour all her hopes into his promise, and think that this year would be “the one”.

Johnathon was working through the night, papers littered his desk, essays, documentations, diagrams, photographs, and there were even a couple of models of his subjects. I walked into his office at around midnight to see his pen scrawling madly across paper. I placed a coffee on the corner of his desk and peered over his shoulder at his papers. My eye caught one particular photograph that was so horrific, it still haunts me to this day. My reaction was of pure revulsion and fear, of such force, I knocked John's coffee cup to the floor. His pen stopped moving.
His head remained bent over the paper, “What?” he asked, with a tone of annoyance.
“Sorry, John, it's just that... that picture” I pointed at the foul, disfigured image in the photo, trying my best not to look at it again.
“Filthy beasts” He said. “they're human, but they've altered themselves. I don't know why, I don't know how, and if I don't figure that out soon, I'll miss Christmas again.”
A sharp knock came from the door. John looked at his watch before muttering to himself “of course”. He strode out of his office to answer the door. I followed him, still trying to get the photograph out of my mind. I was afraid of what these monsters might be capable of doing, but I felt that sticking close to a learned man such as Johnathon would be safest for me. I figured that the more I knew, the less I would fear, and I would be able to sleep without images of that photograph torturing me while I sleep. How very wrong I was.

John's colleagues had arrived with a gift that pleased him beyond doubt. They had brought him his specimen to study, dissect and analyze. He led them down to the basement laboratory, helping them navigate the 8 feet long crate through the building. The crate rattled and shook continuously, as if something alive was in there. I followed tentatively down the stairs, keeping my distance, a growing dread sat in my stomach, for I had made an educated guess that the thing in the crate was the same specimen as the monster in the picture. I shivered just thinking about it, but that reaction was nothing to the paralyzing fear I felt when I actually discovered that my assumptions were correct.

Once in the basement, the men used a crowbar to pry open the lid. They turned it over onto the floor, and I had a clear view of the creature within. Almost 8 feet tall, vampirous in appearance (according to descriptions in folklore, at least), battered and twisted wings were bonded to its side, limbs bound, mouth gagged. If it weren't for these things keeping it secure, I would have left then and there, out of the room, the office, the city, hell, I'd probably have been on a ship half way to America before the others realized I had gone. But even with the bondage, and the six burly men restraining the struggling monster, my feet were rooted to the floor with fear. I would have screamed, but my terror had robbed me of that, too. It was only after John stuck a needle into his specimen and dragged the limp body into a prison-like cell, that I found the strength to sit down, and get my brain functioning properly again.

I watched as John gathered samples from the creature, clippings off its wings, blood samples, saliva samples, teeth molds. He worked from behind the locked bars, which caused my stomach to turn, if the beast were to awaken, he'd be dead. But he worked quickly and efficiently, appearing calm and collected, while I sat in the corner, trying to stop my head spinning just thinking about the situation. He then lacerated the bonds holding the creature into place, and it slackened onto the floor. Although John didn't show it physically, he was relieved to get out of the cell and lock his specimen away. He put the samples under microscopes, he took notes, he mixed the fluids with chemicals, he took more notes. I had no idea what he was looking for, and by the way he held his head over his work, neither did he.

The “creature” in the cell started to come around as the drugs wore off. It got to its feet, head almost touching the ceiling, wings had barely enough room to unfold. John had his back turned, and had no notice, so did a few of his colleagues, who were also conducting several small scale experiments. But a couple of others noticed too, and they looked very afraid. The vampire yelled, a long, agonizing, almost wolf-like cry. It rattled the bars of the cell and batted its wings furiously.
“Mi ala fa'hra shi omar!” It yelled. “ Mi ala fa'hra shi omar!”
John was now staring at the creature as it repeated this phrase at the top of its lungs. His pen scrawled across parchment, but his eyes remained fixated on the beast. What were these words it was speaking? What language? What meaning? I looked over at Johnathon, he sat there with his papers, pen still flailing madly. When we came down to the basement, the desk and equipment were all neatly organized, now, after the short time while John and his men worked, his desk was as messy as the one in his office, paper strewn everywhere, he had books opened all over the place, and now he was intently observing the conscious daemon's actions. He was writing frantically, absorbing every movement, every action processed by this creature's mind. A full psycho-analysis was unfolding before my eyes, and he sat there writing, mimicking the phrase under his breath, “Mi ala fa'hra shi omar”.

We had been in the basement for hours, but I seemed to be the only one in the room at a loss as to what to do. There came a point where I could take it no longer, my still silence and observations were driving me mad. I got to my feet and shuffled back upstairs to make beverages for John and his team. From the small office kitchen, I could still head the monster's cries. I didn't want to go back down there, so I took as much time as needed to prepare the tea and coffee. Several minutes passed, as I waited for the water to boil, when I noticed a loud crash from below. The lights went out, I could hear some yelling and grunting from the basement, of which I couldn't distinguish man from beast. I stood fast, rooted to the spot, waiting for some indication to move. I waited a few more minutes, listening intently to the sounds beneath me. Were they... dead? I couldn't hear anything any more, such was the sudden, intense silence. No voice or movement could be heard, I was isolated in the darkness, fear starting to consume me, consciousness confusing real with dream. It was all real, no I wasn't imagining things. I was brought to my senses by the sound of slow, heavy footsteps climbing up the stairs.

The footsteps were moving closer and closer. I could hear them just outside the kitchen door. A faint candlestick glow came through the doorway, it was Johnathon.
“Oh, thank God” I said, and I followed him back out into the hallway. “What happened?”.
“They had given the specimen its tranquilizer, opened the cell to take it out, but it failed to react to the shot, and it lashed out and attacked them”, his voice was shaking slightly. “Three... maybe four of them were badly injured. When the vampire lashed out, he also knocked out the power generator.” John went into his office and got his pen and paper. He scrawled something down and folded up the paper. He handed it to me and said “Can you do a favour for me? Take this note to my daughter, Elizabeth, and then come straight back, we need to sort this mess out”.

John walked with me to the door, then I ran down the street. As soon as I turned the corner, I unfolded the message and read, “Dear Elizabeth, I won't be making it home for Christmas this year. I am truly, deeply sorry. With sincerest apologies, your father.”
I folded the note up, regretting the situation John was forced into. He was like a small, innocent creature, being boxed in by an 8 feet tall carnivorous bat. I started running again, his house wasn't very far from his office. The note was crumpled in my hand, my grip on it was unrelenting. I came to a halt outside the house, doubled over to catch my breath. I lifted a fist and knocked on the door. I saw little Elizabeth peer through the curtains of the front window to see who I was. She opened the door to let me in.
“Hello, Elizabeth” I said kindly. “I'm sorry I can't stay this time, I'm just here to give you this note from your father”. A tear rolled down my cheek. It tore me up inside to bring such devastating news to such a young, innocent child.
“Thank you, Mr. Dawson” she said, and she began unfolding the note. Her lip trembled as the news hit her. She looked up from the paper to say something to me, but I had already started running back to her father.

I approached the office to find that the electricity had been restored. I walked through the open front door, and called out, “John!?”
“I'm in the basement!” He yelled back.
I crept down the stairs once again, afraid of what I would find there. The room was pretty messy, quite a bit of blood on the floor, and John stood over a table, strapped to which was the vampire. There were 3 of John's colleagues also standing over the creature, the others, I noticed to my horror, were locked in the cell, piled on the floor.
“Are they... dead?” I asked.
“No, they're unconscious. They should come round soon enough, but I'd prefer that they were dead. They were bitten by the specimen, and if my research is consistent, they have been infected with a virus which will latch on to their brain, release toxins into their blood. They'll have to leech off the blood of others to keep their blood oxygenated, to stay alive.”
“So, how's this one staying alive?” I was revolted by the thought of the werewolf-like disease John was speaking of.
“These wings here”, he said, indicating to the large black wings sprouting from the creature's back, “they're grown over time, due to a genetic alteration from the infection. The wings create a blood stimulation that produces a hormone which balances against the decay. A lot of people who get this disease will die shortly after, because they can't replenish their blood.”
It was disturbing, yet hauntingly tragic, how precise John had been with his research on the existence of such an aberration of nature.

His next actions truly disturbed me more than anything he had done in the past. He produced a hacksaw from his tool kit, lifted one of the vampire wings off the table, and began sawing it off from the unconscious vampire. He held a jar to the base of the wing, collecting its viscous blood. He proceeded to do the same with the other. Then, he slowly raised the jar to his lips, and consumed its entire contents. And at that point, I realized. I departed the room in an instance, up the flight of stairs, out onto the street, as far from his as possible, for I knew that he was void of all human emotions.
From several blocks away, I heard a menacing cry coming from his office, “ Mi ala fa'hra shi omar!”
And I knew that never again, would he see his daughter on Christmas...

The Butcher of Krankhafte

2010-02-02T22:09:00.000+08:00

1- The Krankhafte Plague

The history of humankind is fraught with mayhem and disaster, death and destruction, and it's all self-inflicted. We're so arrogant that we can't stop fighting amongst ourselves to see that we aren't our own worst enemies. There's so much more out there that we should be protecting ourselves against. There are many more enemies that we should dominate over, should we stand and fight together. There are so many more enemies of mankind that slip past us unnoticed, biding their time, waiting for the opportune moment to slither in for the kill.

I first noticed these unnamed enemies towards the end of World War II, during the winter of 1941. It was another bitter cold day, in my small, poorly insulated apartment in Berlin. The curtains were drawn shut, as I was sickened by the view portrayed through the window. The city was a mass of chaos and confusion, police brutality caused an uproar of hysteria, people were afraid to leave their homes during the day. People hurried to and from work, not staying in the streets longer than they needed to be. Planes flew overhead at all hours of the day and night. Some planes dropped bombs. I lay awake at night praying to God that these next planes were German planes, that the bombs they carried were German bombs. The sky was tainted with all the colors of war, the scene displayed outside my window was one of fear and anxiety. The scene outside my window was one of man-made hell.

I was like everyone else, I didn't dare leave the house except for work, and even then, I'd try to bring work home and get as much as I could done in the security of my apartment. I was a professor of the sciences at the Berlin University, so I was obliged to present myself to my class periodically throughout the week. I marked the papers and wrote the lectures and tests from my apartment, and I also had my research papers that I had been working on. I went by the name of Friderik Eisenbachs, but that changed after I discovered the truth behind a terrible plague.

One particular day, whilst I was at the university, giving a lecture to my class on the practicality of religion, the master professor of the institute knocked on the door, and informed me that he had waiting on the telephone, a man whom wished to speak to me, and only to me, concerning a matter of grave importance. At the time, I didn't know how important that phone call was (I doubt even he knew, himself, for that matter), so I rushed to the professor's office and held the receiver to my ear, and heard the voice of my family doctor. My mother and father were deathly ill, with a sickness like nothing he'd ever seen before.

He had called to arrange for me to bring some books to him from the university library, in a desperate attempt to find a cure for my parents. He had also organized a bus fare for me to travel into my home village of Krankhafte, leaving that afternoon, so I could aid him in his research for this seemingly incurable disease. I explained the situation to the master professor, whom gave me his consent to take leave. I wasted no time getting my act together, it felt like only moments had passed and then I was boarding the bus, to leave my bruised and broken city behind.

2- The Tortured Mind

To my embarrassment, I had fallen asleep on the bus. My face compressed against glass, I opened my eyes and looked around to find that the bus had come to a halt, and all the other passengers had departed. My mind took its time to return to full consciousness, and it was quite some time before I noticed that the bus driver had gone. So I gathered myself and stepped off the bus. My luggage was stacked unceremoniously on the path, and I began gathering the cases and bags of luggage, when I noticed that the bus driver was leaning casually against the wall, cigarette in hand. I didn't think he had noticed me, but then he spoke out.
“Strange things happenin' round here...” He said. “Don't know what possessed you to journey out this direction.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I was raised here. This is my home.”
“Times have changed, boy. Times have changed. No person in their right mind comes into Krankhafte 'nemore.”
“But, what about the other people on the bus?”
“You were the only person on this bus, son...”
“What? I saw... The town... Does this have anything to do with the war?”
“It's got something to do with a war, yes.” and with that, he threw his cigarette butt on the ground and walked away.

I made my way through the cobbled streets towards the house in which my parents lived, the house in which I was raised, the words of the bus driver echoing in my mind. What did he mean? What's going on? I walked through the village, and I made my way towards the old dirt road, overgrown with cannibalistic weeds. I walked down the road that I knew so well, yet I felt that the warmth of my carefree childhood was gone. I anticipated the joyful nostalgia of my youth, but I could sense that something was definitely not right, and that my presence was undesired in this place. I came to the end of the road and I piled my luggage on the ground, to unlatch the front gate to my old home. The porch light came on, and a man emerged from the house.
“Friderik, it's been so long!” It was our family doctor, Isaac Waultz. “Come, come. The guest room is prepared for you. You need your rest after the journey. No, don't worry about your luggage, I'll bring it in. Go on, get inside!”
I walked over the threshold, and found my way into the guest room, where I fell into an interrupted sleep, perverted with nightmares of wars, and ghost towns, and people that don't exist...

The next morning, I had an insufferable migraine, burning into my skull, every pulse of blood to my brain was like the hardest of hammers. I walked into the room the doctor had adopted as his study. I pulled a seat up to his desk, and piled my books in front of him.
“Friderik”, he said, “ we need to talk. Your mother and father are very ill, they're sick with a plague. This plague... is like nothing I've ever seen before, It spreads like wildfire! It's taken hold of almost everyone in this village. So many people have already died, so many more are closing in on death, your parents are amongst those. I believe it to be an act of chemical warfare, on Britain's behalf, but that's irrelevant to the cure of this damn plague.”

I thought this was quite far fetched. For an attack such as this to go unnoticed would be nothing short of impossible. The more time I spent pondering over the facts, the more I began to feel that the plague had arisen from within the village. I sat in the doctor's study, contemplating how to react to his ludicrous theory, when I heard a loud crash come from overhead. Moments later, myself and Dr. Waultz, saw through the study window, a body falling onto the front driveway. My mother was dead.

I sat, stunned, as the doctor hurried outside to confirm that the unthinkable was indeed true. He came back inside, to check up on my father, and to call the funeral home to take my mother's body away. I just sat, mortified by the event that had unfolded before my very eyes. My father had gone into shock, and the doctor feared that he too would break down soon. How soon, he wouldn't say. A matter of days, weeks, hours? The doctor started reading through the books I had brought him, determined to find a faint sign of a cure, but he was clutching at straws. The books were so full of unimportant, neglected knowledge, they were worthless. Every now and then, the doctor would stop and jot down a few things on his notepad, before opening up more books, taking a few more notes. He'd usually end up ripping the notes out and discarding them. A few times, he took the notes, and pulled out his medicines, and tested his cures on my father. Out of the half dozen times he tried, he gained nothing. In fact, a couple of the medicines seemed to agonize my father even more than the “normal” tortured delusions, and make his condition all the worse. I just sat in my chair in the doctor's office, and watched him, as the hours ticked by, until he closed the last book.

He held in his hand one piece of note paper, littered with his scrawled handwriting. He was about to take something out of his medicine bag, when there came a knock at the front door. He pulled two small bottles from his bag, and hastily poured one into the other.
He handed it to me and said “give this to your father, I'll answer the door.”
I got to my feet, and walked into the downstairs bedroom, where my father sat on the end of his bed staring into nothingness. The doctor had moved him downstairs to prevent an incident like that of my mother's death from happening again. I knelt beside my father, and showed him the bottle. He winced, and turned away, quite childishly. I held the back of his neck for support, and pushed the bottle up to his lips. The amber liquid spilled into his mouth, and slid down his throat. I could faintly hear the doctor talking to a man at the front door. It must have been the people from the funeral home, here to collect my mother.
I could just make out their words. “She's just in the front yard” the doctor said, pointing in the general direction.
“No, that can't be right.” The other man spoke, “there's no-one there at all.”
I felt my throat swell up, I couldn't believe it. I later discovered that the man was speaking the truth. My mother's body had gone, without a trace.

I didn't know how to feel, how to react. I walked towards the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, to settle myself down, but when I came out of the study into the hall, I saw my father rip open the back door, and dash outside and over the fence. I yelled out in frustration, and ran full slog out the back door in chase of my fevered father. He was running through the grass fields behind the houses leading into town. He looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes infused with insanity. He turned down an alley between two small cottages. I was almost caught up to him, but as I rounded the corner into the dark alley, he was nowhere to be seen...

I continued down the alley, unsure of where my father was, when I heard a blood curdling scream reverberate throughout the dark walls of the alley. I turned every which way, to pinpoint the origin of the horrific cry, when I glimpsed my father, dashing across the street, madness emblazoned in his eyes, and tattooed onto his soul. There was a woman, lay injured on the cobbled road, fear locked in her body, as she watched my father flee towards the town center. I ran after him, post haste, intent on suppressing the beast within him. I caught up to him outside the pub, and wrapped my arms around him, to keep him from fleeing again. He writhed viciously in my grip, and managed to get an arm free. His fist collided with my nose, and I felt a white hot pain blister on my skin. I let go, and held my hands to my bloody face. My father pushed away, and stumbled into an inebriated bystander. It only took the drunk one swift bullet-like punch to the jaw, to knock my father out cold.

The man said nothing, but instead vomited onto the wall of the pub, before staggering into the night to leave my father unconscious. I pulled my arm around him and dragged him to his feet, ignoring the blood running down my face out of my nose. My head was spinning, I felt myself drifting in and out of focus. I held onto my father, despite tremendous back strain. I held onto my father, and dragged him through the streets. A voice inside my head was guiding me along the deserted streets, telling me where to turn, where to cross, until I came to a rest outside a very run-down looking shop. The sign was heavily worn, and spattered with blood and grime, but I could make out the lettering: “The Krankhafte Butcher”. My stomach was filled with dread, many a tale of torture and murder have been told of the butcher of Krankhafte. Regardless, I was in no situation to go elsewhere, and there was some unnamed fate that had driven me here, so I took a deep breath, and knocked heavily upon the massive door.

3- The Impending Fate

The door opened, and I was faced with a giant of a man. Fists the size of boulders, and as tough as them too, this cleaver-wielding giant was the pinnacle of the evolution of man. He must have seen the body in my arms as an offering, as he greedily snatched my father out of my arms with little effort, and sunk back into the dank building that was his meat shop, indicating me to follow. Stunned into silence, I followed, anxious to discover the fate of my father.

As a child, I had heard stories of this meat shop, blood running down the walls, corpses lying on tables with their insides removed, and their hollow shells stitched back together with clumsy needlework. In reality, the only blood in the room was that which my father and I had brought in, and there were no corpses, no tables... nothing. Walls, ceiling, floor. Maybe his killing floor is hidden away, my mind was starting to feel regret for leading me here. Nothing made sense. We came to the end of the room, and followed some stairs down to the basement. It was almost pitch black, and I carefully navigated my way down step after step. There came a point where I expected to find the flat, cool surface of the basement floor, but the stairs kept going down and down. The stone steps were venting cool air into the narrow stairway, evaporating the sweat beads as they rolled down my cheek. My muscles tensed up and my concentration towards descending the stairs doubled. I had the feeling that if I lost my footing, I would plummet through the darkness to my eternal death...

We kept going down and down, we were deep under the village by this time, and I noticed that the sound of my footsteps suddenly became more dense and less echoed. My next step sent an unexpected shiver through my body, as my foot fell ankle deep in ice cold water. The figure ahead of me kept going down, so I clenched my teeth and kept right on behind him, even though a few more steps would have completely submerged me in water. However, we had at last come to the bottom of the stairs. I saw the silhouette of the giant in front of me grab a torch from its bracket on the wall and light it. The shocking reds and oranges of the flickering torchlight stunned my eyes and I was temporarily blinded.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw a wide underground graveyard, flooded to waist height, the tombs and gravestones lay below the eerie green surface. The butcher walked around the perimeter, lighting the torches along the walls, bringing this aberration of mankind into reality. Creatures of the like I'd never seen before, hell-spawn from another planet. I waded towards the center of the room, where an ancient stone sculpture of an angel stood with all the grace of God, and all the tragedy of hell, its chipped and stained figure opened its arms in acceptance. It was the only tomb that was raised above the water. My father was lain peacefully on the lid of this marble deathbed, the butcher stood at my father's feet, his head bowed in silent prayer. In that instance I knew two things; that the butcher was not as barbaric and merciless as I had imagined, and my father was definitely dead.

I was about to give my life up to the butcher, for the sheer hopelessness of my situation, but at that point of realization, a score of human-shaped alien creatures rose from the water on the far side of the room. They were dark, bruised creatures, with scales and rotten flesh. They bore slits on their chests, in which they appeared to be breathing, but the black slime that seeped from their gills was too horrific to contemplate. I staggered backwards, to get away from them, and back up the stairs. I was afraid to turn my back on these creatures for fear of what terrors they could potentially unleash upon me, but I couldn't know where I was going, and the risk of tripping over a tomb would surely bring me to an end as well. So I turned my head, to find the doorway, the bottom of the steps. Corner to corner, I stared long and hard along the walls, but the opening in which I came through no longer existed. I was frantically wading through the water, eyes intent on believing that there was actually an opening in the wall. So focused on that wall so far away, I tripped on a small carved stone idol, and fell beneath the water.

Eel like creatures wrapped themselves around my limbs, chest and throat. I was choking. I tried to breathe in, but I only consumed the putrid water. It flooded my lungs, burning my body away from the inside. I was seizing up, my mind had gone into spasms, and the electrode synapses of my brain were being torn apart. The toxic water spread throughout my body, turning me into a hollow shell. My eyes were eaten out from behind, and the water streamed into me through my eye sockets at an alarming rate. I was dead, and the eels were swimming around my hollowed body, a mother actually swam down my throat and laid its eggs inside me. This was the end of Friderik Eisenbachs.

4- The Immortal Horror

I opened my eyes, surprised to find that I still had a consciousness. Was I in heaven? The pain was gone, My vision was restored, and as far as I could tell, there were no adolescent eel creatures swimming in my stomach, so I naturally assumed that I was embracing the afterlife, whatever it may be. How very wrong I was. Lying on my horizontal, I peered up at a stone ceiling, ancient and overgrown with moss and algae. I tried to make out the figure etched into the stone. It appeared to be a king of some sort, for it had a magnificent crown upon a fiercely determined face. Huge muscular arms, one holding a long, sharpened trident. His legs looked sleek and strong, but it was only when I saw his chest did I realize where I was, for it bore the same gill-like slits as the vile creatures that had caused my death. But this man-beast also sported a giant eye-like organ that sat just above where I'd expect his stomach to be. I was in the same room underneath the village that I died in. I was lain upon the very tomb where my father had died.

I made to sit upright, but the water-demon monsters held me down with their vice-like grips. I was about to scream, but one of them forced his putrid hands over my mouth, so the sound just reverberated through my skull. I tried to struggle, but I knew there was no escape. After a few moments I knew resistance was useless, and I stopped struggling, and they loosened their hold on me. The butcher appeared at my side, and indicated to the monsters to release their hold on me completely. I lay there, chest heaving, mind spinning, and the butcher spoke to me, in a fatherly way.
“Shh... it's OK, you can relax. We're not going to hurt you.”
“W-w-what's going on?” I said.
“Don't worry, don't think too much... Everything will be fine. Oh, and I think your father will be pleased to see you've come round.”

My... father?... I saw him die. The butcher started to explain things to me. He was hesitant at first, but when he got started, he talked of such aberrant blasphemies that gave me the worst of mind aches should his words even contain a minute trace of truth. He showed me the secret doorways concealed in the walls of the dungeon. There were more than a dozen passages leading from this massive chamber into all kinds of unfathomable rooms and dungeons, and the butcher even spoke of an underground city, unbeknown to the likes of the authorities above. My first passage down one of these demonic hallways, the butcher took me to see my father. He led me down a long, descending passage, where we walked in almost complete darkness for near on an hour before he came to a halt. Beckoning me forward, he opened a large marble door ushering me into a vast expanse of utmost terror.

Walls stood up, 20 times the height of man, with elaborate marble carvings surrounding the massive room, pews lined up facing an altar, which was positioned between the feet of a 100ft statue of the demonic man-beast that I saw when I first awoke. I felt sick. I was standing in a church of the most blasphemous of the demon cults. It took me a moment to take all this devastation in, before I realized that the butcher and I weren't the only living beings in the room. A man knelt before the altar, embracing this false God as his own. He sat in silence and prayer before rising to his feet and turning to face me.
“Oh, the Lord be praised, my son has returned!” this man looked at me as if he knew me, but he was not my father. His skin was bruised and scaled, he had slits on his chest, in which he seemed to be breathing. His teeth were black, and his green viscous saliva slid down his mouth and onto his chin. His eyes, however... I could recognize those eyes anywhere. They were indeed my fathers eyes. These monsters had turned him into one of them, and I knew, at that moment, that they had done the same crime of nature to me too...

5- The Rapture of the Masses

As I stood, staring into my father's eyes, I felt a mixture of emotions. He had defied science, and had been reincarnated from the dead. The more we talked the more I understood that deep under the bruised and scaled skin, there was still a large part of my father's mind that was distinctively his. To take in the ultimate phenomenon which stood before my eyes, and which I too stood as proof thereof, would be nothing short of extraordinary. I could feel that I too was mostly the same person that I used to be, yet my father explained to me this strange and new anatomy to me. The gills on our chests not only breathed in oxygen, but food, too. This underground labyrinth was old as the earth itself, and the dark, damp, stone walls were hosts to fungal growth. They released infinitesimally small spores into the air, and we, the living dead, breathed in these spores, which stimulated our cell growth, to some level. There was a whole alien Eco-system evolving underground, in which the people above us knew absolutely nothing at all.

As the days passed, I learned more about this new existence. The eel that had laid eggs inside me played an essential role in my existence. The baby eels were born to feed off of my body, so that they could give the nerves in my body the ability to move at my own will. It was a host/symbiote relationship, and this matter of living could be sustained eternally. As the days passed, I felt my initial fears ebb away, and I started to relax, and enjoy being with my perfectly healthy father again. It was a while before I actually noticed that this surreal and wonderful life was not nearly as beautiful and innocent as I believed, it was my perception that was so shockingly jaded. It was in the reincarnation of my mother that returned all the fear, dread and realisation. I was sledgehammered back into the real world with a blow I would never recover from.

I sat in the corner of a small room, along with the butcher and two others. A dim, flickering light bulb was suspended in the middle of the ceiling, directly over a stone table. The butcher had told me that I would witness the splendour and miracle of their life-giving science, but as I saw my own mother dragged into the room, limp and dirty, I felt utmost revulsion. I sat in the corner, and I couldn't help but watch as these three men hollowed out my mother's body all except the brain, before placing all sorts of devilish parasites into her body. I watched as these parasites wove strands of ligaments into muscles, as they rebuilt her skeletal system, as they stitched in the artificially grown lung organs, and carved the gills into my mother's chest, and finally, they lowered the eel into her stomach cavity to lay its eggs, to bring the interdependent relationship into motion.

I was shocked at the operation, but a part of me was desperate to see her alive, and to talk to her again. However, my mother took her reincarnation terribly. Her brain refused to believe the truth, and her body rejected the symbiote, and she died. The butcher told me that this sometimes happens, when the brain doesn't conform to the acceptance of the parasite. He told me that of those that manage to pull through the reincarnation process, none have reverted. Some question the authenticity, but that's another process everyone has had to go through. My mind was being manipulated by the very creatures that sustained my life. I was a corpse, with my thought patterns slowly being moulded like clay into a mind that lacks the ability to question the authenticity of its own actions.

I was depressed that my mother couldn't be revived, but I was also envious that she was blessed enough to die, untouched by the sin of these monsters. I lost my will to think and act, I sat without motion for days on end, but the truth kept coming, hard and fast, like an eternal hail storm with the ferocity of God, upon unleashing his almighty wrath. I started going to the reincarnation operations more frequently, until I began assisting in the procedures, helping to tear these God made creations, and embed into them the deepest sins of Satan, himself.

One day, after a particularly long operation, the butcher pulled me aside, and said; “Son, I think it's time you know. Haven't you wondered, haven't you asked yourself where all these bodies come from?”
I shook my head.
“There's a group of men going out to collect some more bodies soon. I want you to go with them.”
I nodded my head, and walked off to join this body collecting group. There was a small group, about five or six men, talking and laughing. They were all dressed meticulously, so that only the smallest amount of skin possible was shown. They handed me some clothes and asked me to do the same, as we were going above ground. The clothing was very restricting on my gills, but I knew that I wouldn't dare be seen above ground with my horrible uncensored anatomy for all to see.

The fresh open air was a marvellous thrill. I tried to consume as much of the night sky, to drink it all in, but the others pushed me along. They had urgent business to complete, and I was in no position to question that. I followed these men, as they marched into certain houses, unafraid. They could smell the dead and the living, and they could differentiate between, and I knew this, because I sensed it too. I helped them gather bodies and ready them for the journey back underground. Towards the end of the night, the collectors expressed disappointment in the amount of dead they had gathered. So we split up, to save time. I followed a well built, and aggressive man. We walked through the streets for a while, until he stopped outside a little cottage on the outskirts.
I tapped his shoulder and said “I don't think there are any dead bodies in there”.
To which he replied, “I know”.

I watched him sneak into that house, and kill the people within. I was a little disturbed, but for the most part, I was fascinated. I followed him, as he emptied out four more houses in this same brutal fashion. I was curious to know why he would go to such measures to kill these innocent beings, but he avoided a direct answer. So we left to take our collection back underground, to bring them back to life, to help them build up this demonic empire, and the others noticed these people disappearing, but had no contemplation of the massacres, of the secret underground army of undead, growing larger and larger. They had no idea that their world was far more dangerous than they think. Their worst enemies were not who they thought they were. The worst part is that they don't even know.

6- The Eternal Penance

My mind was shaped like those around me. I conformed to sin and demon worship like all the other monsters around me. I saw my town of Krankhafte for what it had become; a portal between innocence and immortal sin. I discovered that my parents didn't die of a plague, they were murdered. The plague was bred from a parasite cultivated within these stone walls. This mass genocide was a way of dealing a massive blow upon mankind, and upon God himself. I was a part of the very thing I despised. I was sickened by what I had become, and what lay ahead of me.

My father was less sceptical. Of course he was, his mind had been moulded exactly as it should have been. I wanted to kill these perfect blasphemies, and myself. Their acts were selfish and merciless. They claimed to be liberating the human race, but they were turning us into monsters. Our mentality was one of blood lust and sin. How could a God justify such crimes? I told myself every day that I still had control over my own mind, but every day, I knew it was one more lie, one more sin bruising the history book of mankind.

I came to a realisation that I, and every other damned reincarnate, were being punished, and dealing God's punishment on mankind. I came to realise that God is a giant kid with a magnifying glass, burning a hole right through my skin and into my soul. I knew there was no going back. I knew that I had the rest of eternity to contemplate the downfall of mankind. I continued to participate in the rituals of killing and reincarnating, and I continued to work the dirty deeds of the devil. I knew that I would be repenting my sins for all eternity, and I knew that I would never again be blessed with the forgiveness of God.

A Fear of Great Heights

2010-01-28T10:25:00.001+08:00

A Fear of Great Heights

Sometimes I'd prefer to be a single-celled organism floating through space. No purpose to carry me. No thoughts or emotions to drag me down. I'm a coward, plain and simple. And if I'm going to tell you my story, you need to know this. I hate crowds and I hate stress, and I can never seem to go a day without avoiding them both. Whenever I get stressed or uncomfortable I like to listen to my music, the louder the better. With each passing day it seems to be growing louder and louder. Like jet engines in my ears, it soothes me.

My house is right around the corner from the train station, a quick walk home by the pale light of the streetlamps. Sometimes I walk around the block before going home, there's something about the deserted roads in the night time that's very relaxing. I just drink in the world as it would be with the volume turned down, and I think to myself, this is peace.

I opened the front door to a familiar squeak upon the hinges and I took solace in the fact that I was home. I brushed my fingers along the dusty banister as I walked to the kitchen. A staircase I had never used, leading to an upper floor I had never even set my eyes upon. Each day I tell myself that today is the day I'm going to climb those stairs and see what's up there. But today is the day I never do. A shiver ran down my spine from the moment I touched the wood, and what lingered on the banister were the fingerprints of what could have been.

I flicked on the light switch to see the kitchen was in the same state in which I left it; slightly dirty, but otherwise reasonably tidy. I walked over to the sink, and pried open the window to let the breeze in. The cool air is a presence I can enjoy, especially on nights like this that are uncomfortably humid. I rinsed my hands and face in the sink and with cupped hands I drank a few mouthfuls of cool water. Then I heard the wailing of sirens nearby and the squealing of tyres and I shut the window. A quiet night is a good night.

The morning came with a fist hammering at the back door. Joe. He invited himself in and put the kettle on. I was already half awake when he started knocking, but I usually needed that extra irritation to convince myself to get out of bed. Joe is my coworker and friend, one of the few people that I can enjoy spending time with. I showered and dressed and came out into the kitchen, following the wafting aroma of bacon and eggs to a plate laid out for me, along with a hot cup of whatever was in the cupboard. It looked like tea.

“Thanks Joe” I said, and sat down to eat the food he had prepared.
“Any time. Gonna climb those stairs today?” Joe asked, with a nod towards the steps just outside the room.
I stopped chewing my bacon to shake my head. Not today, never today. Maybe tomorrow. He nodded and took his emptied plate to the sink and ran hot water over it.
“When?” He asked.
I chewed the bacon a bit more, mulling over the question I knew he would ask. He always does. I always take the time to think, even though I've always got the same answer. I let the chewed up, greasy piece of bacon slide down my throat with a slurp of lukewarm tea.
“When I'm ready.”
He nodded again. “I'll be outside when you're done with your breakfast” he said and walked out towards the front door.
I chewed on another piece of bacon, although I distinctly felt that the taste had gone and I was chewing on cardboard. My mouth felt dry, and the tea did nothing to help. I got through about half of my breakfast tasting the same before I finally tossed the remains in the bin and slid my plate over Joe's.

The front door locked shut with an assuring snap, and I slid the single key into my pocket. Joe and I didn't speak when we walked to the train station, nor when we were on the train itself. He knew I liked it better that way. This time of the morning, there aren't usually many people on the train, and they don't talk much either. And with Joe there, I felt like I didn't need my music to distract myself from their wandering eyes. Besides, the gentle rhythm of the tracks was music enough.

This was how I lived my life, the to and fro between work and home, home and work. Joe was someone I could count on. We always caught the morning train to work, but I always caught the evening train home alone. That was something that couldn't be avoided, and to some extent, I felt like I needed it. The train going home was usually almost empty when I caught it, and even the train station isn't too bad, but unlike my home, I never know if it will be empty or not when I walk through the doors.

This night there were two young guys and a lady sitting aside from them. I sat on the far end of the train and put my headphones on. Volume up. The doors closed and the train started moving and the two young guys stood up. I didn't like that, people shouldn't stand on trains. I reached for my pocket knife, I didn't want them coming anywhere near me. They looked at me, but I kept the knife held in my pocket with one hand and turned the volume up with the other. They walked over towards the lady and grabbed her arms, one each.

She tried to pull her arms back, twisting in their grip, but she only managed to pull herself off her seat. She yelled at them to let go, and she kicked as much as she could, but they just laughed and snatched up her handbag. I could hear over my music even though I turned the volume higher and higher. It was at full volume, screaming in my ear and it didn't protect me from the noise and it felt like her voice was stabbing at my ears. One of the men opened up her purse and stuffed it in his coat pocket. She spat at him, her face twisted in panic and hate, and he pushed her into the seats. She stumbled over closer to me and I realised my hand holding the knife had become slippery with sweat.

From the floor she looked up at me, the coward, and with my music drowning out her voice I saw her mouth the word “please”. The men pulled her to her feet and pushed her down again. My stomach wrenched and my throat stuck and I felt sucked to my seat. She looked up at me again with pleading eyes glazed with tears. Those giant spheres reflected my ballooned image back at me through green irises. She called for my help again and I gripped my knife tighter. They picked her up again and threw her into me. My head smacked into the glass behind me and she fell to the floor again. My headphones had fallen off and I could hear her sobbing and their laughing and the percussive sound of the train tracks.

The two men leaned over the lady to grab at me. That's when I pulled out my knife. I popped the blade out and stabbed the guy with the purse in the hand. He reeled back and held his wrist and yelped out in pain. The blade got him in his palm, and he slumped back in the seat across from me and wiped the dripping blood on his sleeve. The other guy backed away when he saw my knife, and he leant over the purse guy to examine the cut. It wasn't too deep but it probably stung like hell. The lady pulled herself up onto the seat beside me and wiped her nose.

It wasn't a deep cut, but they had figured it would need stitches. And they knew the doctors like to ask questions, especially at this time of night. And they were probably terrible liars. So they gave the lady her purse and handbag back and moved to the other side of the train. My headphones were broken so I had to ride the train the rest of the way without. The lady didn't say much, other than a mumbled thanks, but I guess she was shaken from being thrown around. I didn't put my knife back in my pocket until I was off the train.

“Hey, wait” she said to me when I started walking back home. I turned around.
“Thank you” she said.
“It's ok” I said.
“I know it must have been hard for you to stand up to them like that.”
I nodded.
“I know I owe you so much already but could I please ask you one favour?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“Do you think you could walk me home? I don't think I can cope being alone right now.”
“How far away?” I asked.
“About ten, fifteen minutes' walk, maybe.”
“Too far” I shook my head and turned to walk away.
“Wait!” She called out. “How far away do you live?”
I pointed to my house.
“I could... I could use your bathroom to clean myself up, and call my mother to pick me up. Please?” I saw those big pleading eyes once more and I started walking towards the house.
I knew she was waiting for a “yes” or an “ok” but I figured that a lack of objection was invitation enough.

She followed me back to the house and invited herself in after me. I switched on some lights and pointed her towards the bathroom. I walked into the kitchen and washed my face and hands there, rubbing off the few stray drops of blood that were on my hands and forearms. When she returned, a purple-greenish bruise had appeared on her cheek. There was now a little band-aid stuck across a cut on her brow, and while there was still a little bit of blood on her face, she allowed a smile to sneak upon it. It was a smile that seemed to radiate throughout the room. A smile that said “no, things aren't always ok. Things won't always go your way. But that's ok, because life is full of surprises.”

“Ok?” I asked her.
“Yes, much better, thanks” she said. “Whereabouts is your phone?”
“If you want, you can sort that out in the morning. I'm sure it'll be too much hassle tonight.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Well, if you say so. Which way to the spare bedroom, then?”
“I don't have a spare bedroom set up. I've got a fold out couch in the lounge room though.”
I started walking her through to the lounge room when she stopped at the bottom of the staircase.
“You can't tell me you don't have a spare bedroom upstairs” she said, matter-of-factly.
I shrugged and said “I don't know.”
“How can you not know if you live here?” She said.
“I've just never needed to go upstairs.” I said, truthfully.
“Well, I'm checking it out” she said, and stormed upstairs. I held my fingers out and gently touched the banister where her hand had disturbed the dust. This time... this time it felt different.

I didn't like the not knowing. It blistered inside me while she wandered about upstairs seeing more of my house than I ever have. My hand slid from a gentle touch into a grip on the banister at the bottom of the stairs and I gently raised my foot to the first step.
“You've never been up here?” she called out from a distant room.
“No” I called back. “Not since I was a little child.”
“Why?”
“I told you, I never needed the space up there.”
“Bollocks! Why?”
“I... I don't need to explain myself to you. I just don't go up there. Ok?”
“But you have to come up here. At least once, it's amazing.”
“What is?”
“You'll have to come and see.” She teased.
I took the second step, guided by my firm grip on the banister.

She appeared at the top of the staircase and flicked on the upstairs lights, the lights that have been left untouched for years. I took another step and I grew with excitement at the achievement that I thought would be stuck in tomorrow forever. There were whole rooms up there, and they were a few more step, step, steps away. I reached the top of the staircase where she grabbed my hand and dragged me off towards one of the rooms.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I wanted to ask you the same thing.” She replied. She pulled open the door and lead me into a nursery.

“This house” I said, “It used to be my grandmother's. My parents got it when she passed away and they let me live here. This room would have been my mum's when she was a baby. Grandma didn't like changing things around too much.”
“That's sweet” she said, “I didn't expect to find anything like this up here.” She pointed around to the rocker and the mobiles and wooden cot.
“Why didn't I come up here before?” I said.
“I don't know. You never really needed to.” She said with a little laugh.
“Yes, but I wanted to.” I said with a wry smile.

“Check this out, too” she said, and pulled me again, out of the room and into the next one. “A spare bedroom.” She held my hand tight as she brought me into the room. Her hand was warm and soft and the subtle confidence she had about her seemed to flow through her hand into mine.
“Well then” I said. “I guess you won't be needing the fold out couch.”
“And over here” she let go of my hand and walked across the room, “there's a balcony. The view is brilliant. Come have a look.” She opened the folding doors that led out onto the balcony.
The wind gushed in and pulled a blanket of chill over my head. I stood where I was and shook my head.
“Come on” she urged, “It's amazing.”
“I'm afraid of heights.” I said.
“That's ok” she said, “take it step by step.”
I smiled and nodded. “Step by step.”

Aftermath of In the Valley of the Tempest

2010-01-14T15:32:00.002+08:00

A 50,000 word novel in 30 days is not too bad. As a writer, I'm proud to say that I've accomplished this in a successful NaNoWriMo. Now comes the rewrites. I've had a month of leaving it the hell alone and I've come back with fresh eyes and a fresh attitude and I'm bringing a lot of new ideas to the table. New ideas that I think will really kick the story to the next level. First change is putting everything into the first person POV of the main character, Seth. Then I've changed the order, detail and purpose of the events that occur. I'm fleshing it out and possibly turning it into a series. In musician's terms I'm turning it up to 11. The first novel deals with the long anticipated war of the civilised worlds, and the interference of mysterious, unregistered warships travelling about the country. And Seth finds himself caught in the centre of the action. He does what he thinks is best, he does what he thinks will keep him alive, but later down the track, he understands the consequences of his rash actions, the cause and effect, and he sets out to right his wrongs while trying to find some answers about the mysterious warship, the Stormbringer.

It's been a few days and I'm 754 words into the first novel of the tempest series: Stormbringer. I'm taking my time to write to the best of my abilities, to plan it all out and to tie it all together into one explosive unit. I hope to have sent the finished manuscript to publishers by the end of the year. That's my goal.

In the Valley of the Tempest 1:10

2009-11-09T10:50:00.001+08:00

X

Seth was there before Casper, bruises and all. Hangar 52, the only person that arrived before him was Beatrix, who was currently checking out the weather conditions.
Hi. She said when he walked up to the hangar.
She had some instruments set up on a tripod and she was busy running her eyes over them.
Hi, I'm Seth. He said, and took a peek into the hangar at the Napoleon XI.
Yeah, I know. I'm Beatrix. I'm the pilot.
You're going to fly that thing?
Sure. We've also got the Jericho-C33 plane on board the ship, did that last night. She said, stifling a yawn.
That's awesome. Seth said.
Yeah, it's pretty fun.
How's the travelling going to be today?
Should be alright. Wind speed's no concern, there's some cloud cover, but it should be fine. If you want to put your bags down, you can chuck them in the ship. The boarding platform's on the right and the bunks are to your right. Take whatever one you want.
Thanks. Seth said and wandered off into the hangar.

The ship was massive, one of the largest Beatrix has had to drive yet, and the Napoleon XI was kitted out with the best equipment avaliable. It was a dual buoyancy airship, which means that it's got two layers of bladder air-cavities, one inside the other. The space between the inner and outer bladder is a permanent vacuum, whereas gas is pumped through the inner bladder to control the buoyancy. This fascinated Seth when Beatrix explained it to him after he dumped his bags on top bunk.

It was almost 5:30 when Grissom arrived with his robot Cornwall wandering close behind. Grissom wore a beige travelling coat and carried a large suitcase under arm. He waved at the two standing outside the hangar, an enthusiastic grin spread across his face. He and Casper had already agreed on the price of his coming from retirement for the voyage, and since their initial meeting in the vistograph chamber he had quite remembered what it was like to be setting off on an adventure again.

A little past the deadline, Casper and Richmond came hurrying along, at which point, the four already present had started to make comforts inside the airship and preparing themselves for the long haul. Casper made his apologies before realising that another was absent. Timothy was running quite late. Half an hour and the group shuffled back out to the front of the hangar to search for any signs of him. Then they heard a loud buzzing, as if that of a mosquito, then the faint dot in the distance, growing larger in a whif of smoke and burning rubber. Before they knew it, Timothy raced up to the hangar on his mechanised skate-boots, his luggage in tow on a little trailer behind. He had obviously been working on them through the night and into the morning as the braking and speeding problem seemed to be fixed. Easing back onto the hind wheels, Timothy rolled to a stop in front of the group.
You're late. Casper said, stepping forward in an apparent scold towards the boy. But what a spectacular arrival! A grin split across his face and he threw back his head and laughed.
Yeah, I was just fine tuning my boots. Timothy said with a bashful smile.
Anyway, we've been hanging around more than long enough, we need to get going. Into the ship everybody! Let's go.

In the Napoleon XI everyone grabbed their bunks and congregated in the crew deck for the debriefing.
Ok. Casper said. We're all here now, I'll keep it short. As you should know by now, there's been a death near the marshes past Mariam Ravine. The body was identified as Mr. Grahame Thompson. We only found a head, but sources say there was the whole body by the swamp as of earlier. We're going to go into the swamp. I don't think we'll find much to be honest, but I think the problem stems from further in. Within the swamp there lives a witch doctor, Ursula Estwing. We'll need to interrogate her. I'm sure she will know something. If not about the body, then about these parts, she's been living in the marshes for a long time. If the weather remains fine we'll be down by the marshes shortly after dawn. Beatrix, would you please do us the honours of getting this ship flying?
Of course. She said, and left for the cockpit. We all followed her moments later, wanting to view Berwick one last time before setting off into the wild, wild valley.

In the Valley of the Tempest 1:7-9

2009-11-09T09:28:00.000+08:00

VII

We all the best of us come undone at times. The loose thread that unravels to a busted seam and then it all comes tumbling out. The olny way we can pull it back together is to grab a needle and thread and stitch it back up ourselves, and then eat the stuffing again. Richmond Bantam had stitched himself up a fair few times but more often than not he was picking at the threads of other people. Bad people. He'd worked alongside Casper for years and years, and Casper knew he could use the extra pair of fists out beyond the city limits.

It was Richmond, with Casper and Grissom and Beatrix and Timothy, and Cornwall too, whom had congregated abouts West University. They were there in the speaker's corner along with Professor Duckworth, and Duckworth was addressing his audience.
It is my tragic duty to inform you all of recent events. There has been another death in the valley, only just beyond the Mariam Ravine. I have with me an esteemed group of individuals who will be investigating the crime further. Detective Bernstein, Dr. Johnstone, Mr. Bantam, Miss Beatrix and Mr. Timothy Wallace have gathered here because they will be setting off on an expedition into the valley on the morrow. And Detective Bernstien here has graciously invited one student of West University to join them on their task, with the expedition offering experience in the most practical sense. It will be dangerous, most dangerous indeed, but I think you'll know who you are, those of you who are up for the challenge.

Thank you, professor. Casper said, as he stepped forward to address the audience.
My name is Detective Casper Bernstein, I don't have much to say, more than what has already been said. I look forward to the opportunity of working closely with one of you, I'm sure the expedition won't disappoint.

The audience looked half afraid and half excited, such news does not come their way often. They knew of the valley, they knew the stories, the mysteries that had gone on down there in the past, but here, now, people in the flesh and blood stating with confidence that they were willing to venture into that, it brought everything right home, it was real. One of us they throught. One of us will join them before the day is gone. Leaving tomorrow, dropping the studies, dropping the tests and assignments for the great untamed valley.

Professor Duckworth stepped forward to speak again, the bring the disoriented crowd into unity once more.
You should all know that we have not selected the one student as of yet, but rather a list of eight nominees. It is to my knowledge that all eight of you are present now. The chosen one will be the victor of a small fight tournament. The detective here will act as referee. Howard Arthur, Fiona Mathers, Jordan Lincoln, Seth Carter, Nicola Porter, Jesse Temperley, Kyle Ford and Sally Westfield. Make yourselves ready for the fights in the couryard on the half hour.

VIII

Kyle steepd up to the platform first to face Seth. Kyle was smart and reasonably strong. But in all his time at West U, he'd spent much more time studying than bare knucle fighting or participating in stick combat. Seth, on the other hand, fought regularly. If not for necessity then for fun. Truth be told, he liked a bit of pain and bandages in his life, a reminder of his inherently flawed being. He gripped his rod with a menace and brought down upon Kyle with a whirl. There was no competition. The crowed cheered as Seth landed the hits, flourishing, smattering, the thunk thunk thunk of wood on skin, and Kyle fell quicker than a rock. Two more unforgiving bouts and Bernstein called it. Seth didn'tknow much about the expedition, merely the fact that it'd look damn impressive on his resume after graduation. Danger, hell, what's life without a bit of it, eh?

Three more fights Seth sat in the wings, watching, studying, the women were swift and agile, they who've obviously been through their fair share of the stick combat, and they who were obviously not going to let up for anything. But Jesse took Howard down with a mighty swing from his left cannon. Howard copped a good block shot, but the sheer force of the blow had him buckling at the knees. But the dull thock, thock, thock of wood on wood echoed throughout the courtyard as the blows kept coming until Jesse towered over the poor fellow.

The next round had an intensity that couldn't be beat. Each fighter with a win out of the way came back fresh with a new fighting vigour. Seth and Sally, Jesse and Nicola. Sally came out swinging and Seth ducked and weaved and blocked and guarded his way across the floor. He scanned for an opening, a weakness, a mistake to manipulate to his advantage, but he only just got by with the steady tock, tock, tocking of the battering sticks. They rallied all about, he was quick, she was probably quicker. A flourish and blur of wavering weapons, and then the smack of wood on skin. He leaped back, crying out in frustration. She let a satisfying grin consume her face and she stepped forwards confidently. She was quicker, but he was stronger. He sent a swift, strong blow raging upon the perpendicular to her own stick, and then came the sickening crunch of splintering and snapping wood. She was left with naught but two little twigs in her hands with which to defend herself.

Try as she might, Sally could do little to prevent the flourish of attacks that proceeded, her stumpy weapons thunked hard off the full force of Seth's weapon. They jarred her hands terribly, and then she was all a mess. It didn't take long for Seth to work her to the ground and pass the victory onto him. Next bout saw a replacement weapon in her hand, but she did little to redeem, The damage was done, and whilst Seth regretted the bruises he inflicted upon her, he knew she would likewise have attacked without hesitation upon him. And Jesse... well, he was a force to be had, and his strong aggression showed once more. With little more than a small bruise on the shoulder, Jesse met Seth to go for the win.

IX

If you wanted something at West University, you had to fight for it. You had to want it enough to fight for it. It makes things worth having. Seth wanted a bit of danger in his life and a bit of extra punch to his resume. Jesse mainly liked winning. He liked the satisfying feel of his knuckles passing over another man's face and not giving a shit for the consequences. Some say the city trembled that day when Jesse and Seth fought. Each bruise that came up on Seth's skin just made him feel the more hurt, the more alive, and the danger pumped him on to dole out a bit of the beating too. Punch for punch they fairly smacked eachother up. Some could say they heard the crack when Seth sent his fist into Jesse's leg. Some could say they heard the crack, but all could hear the scream. No killing, and no breaking of the bones. In several ways Seth was lucky that it was only a fracture and not a complete break.

Jesse fell to the courtyard floor writhing in the dirt, his face and chest a flourish of cracked blood and wholesome rainbow coloured bruises. The white plaster cast he'd be wearing for the next week would look very much out of place amongst his other, more nonchalant injuries. He buried his head in the ground and Seth stepped back, waiting to hear from the referee's verdict. They carried off Jesse to see the nurse. She typically got these sorts of patients about two or three times a week. No one said anything.

The more they waited, the more Seth became agitated. Someone tried to clean him up but he just pushed them away and tried to shrink further from sight. A strong hand grasped Seth by the shoulder and gave him his wish, pulling him from the crowd and out away from the courtyard. It was the detective, Casper Bernstein, and Seth didn't know whether to feel proud or ashamed of his fight. Instead, he just felt queasy.

Well, son, you sure beat him. The detective said as soon as they had drawn quiet of the crowd.
Thanks.
So, an engineer, huh?
Yeah, that's the plan.
Good, good. Two years to go?
Two and a half.
And you do a bit of brasswork on the side?
Yeah, a bit of a hobby.
You know, the mechanic, Timothy, does some of that stuff too. Inventions and things. I tell you what, we could sure use a guy like you on this expedition.
You're taking me? Seth said with enthusiasm.
Well, of course, why not?
Eh, I just thought there might be something about the way that I won, what with the bone fracture and all.
It'll be fine, Seth, don't worry. Now, right now, we need you to pack and be ready to leave at dawn. Meet us down at the airfield, hangar 52, at about 5:30. We'll debrief before we head off, right now, we're keeping things quite low key.
Ok. Thanks a lot, detective. I'll be there.
I'm counting on it. Casper walked back to join in with the group, as Seth peeled off to go back to his dormitory and pack. And tomorrow came before he really knew it.

In the Valley of the Tempest 1:4-6

2009-11-03T22:27:00.000+08:00

IV

The crickets hollered out to eachother as the light drew near. Run to the thistle bushes, run and hide, and be safe from the giant with the wide sweeping sun in his hand. Down the ravine the crickets sprung hither and thither. The occasional mouse scampered from thicket to rock to tree root.Even more scarce were the maraqets, the cat sized mice that built their shelters in the trees. Casper was greeted by the occasional glowing pair of eyes in the moonlight, suspended in the black branch of a wild oak. When Casper shined his light thereabouts they were gone.

Ray wasn't looking for anything particular. Not in the brush, not on the rocks or over the ridge of the ravine. He was Casper's support, he was the backup. He firmly believed in the pecking order despite being down the chain, and while he knew some day he'd love to be in Casper's position, he wasn't exactly trying so keenly to accumulate the brownie points tonight. He was tired. If Casper needed the support, he was there, otherwise he would carry on following aimlessly, wordlessly. Casper sifted his way down the ridge, he examined the bush in which Lenny crashed. It had completely caved as the wheel tore through, branches bending and snapping and scratched at Lenny's legs. Casper found a couple of drops of blood, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing excessive. Deeper into the bush was where the wheel crashed and blanketed the foliage flat. Sometimes if you get up quick it'll spring back up no harm done, but Lenny fell and lay flat for a moment. It was at the back of the bush where he lay with his warped wheel, through a little gap in the thistle bush. Casper stood in the bush for a while staring at the flat circle of the crash site, before glancing over towards the marshes. Then he crouched down to his knees. Fair enough, the hole was there, and he peered through it. From every which way imaginable, and nothing. No body.

Hey Ray! Casper hollered out. Ray cocked his head and came nearer.
Where are you, sir? Ray called back.
In the bush here. Come check this out for me.
Ray followed the wheel's path in to where Casper crouched staring at the marshes through the bush. Casper turned to look up at Ray.
Here, take a look at those marshlands over there for me. Tell me if you see anything.
Casper got to his feet and moved aside.
No, nothing, sir. Ray said, stifling a yawn.
No, you fool! Down here, through the hole in the thistles! You were at the interrogation.
Casper thumped Ray on his back and pushed him to his knees. Through the thistles the young officer scanned across the marshes. Nothing.
Those dirty liars! Those dirty filthy kids! Playing a dirty trick on us at this hour of the night!
Shut it, Raymond. We don't know anything for certain. For one, we are heading in towards the valley now, and those marshes, well... I'm sure you've heard some of the stories of what's gone on down there.
Ray shivered at the thought, then got to his feet and stepped out of the bush.

They walked down further, Casper still combing the area for clues, Ray still uselessly meandering along behind, albeit now with a keener sense of caution. As they approached the marshes there came a developed mutual understanding. They could see it, and smell it from some distance away, the shining dark patch in the soil a few metres from the foreboding mouth of the marsh-swamp. The tainted earth looked putrid in the moonlight, and the smell was far worse than ordinary death. Here, Casper got out his TK-300 and took a few pictographs of the soil. And then he snapped on some disposable gloves and turned the soil with his small pocket fork. And there he could have puked without hesitation had it not been for a moment's cloud cover. The first patch of freshly exposed earth was writhing with salt-worms and maggots, feasting on a meal pulled under. Before he realised the full horror of what he had witnessed, Casper was able to carry himself to the nearest bush.

Shine a light down, that's the only way we'll ever see. Ray said, curiosity driving him closer.
Casper stood back, trying to will himself to get a better look.
Shine a light down there. He said again.
They're witch grubs.
What? What are they, sir?
They ate the poor bastard. I- I just know they did.
White faced, Casper just stood back further, dreading the very thought of it.
No, sir. The area's too small for them to have... consumed all of him.
Well... Casper leaned in a little. I think you might be right. It just... it smells so...
Yes. Now shine the light down there so we can see it properly.
Casper obeyed, and then came closer, willing the smell from his mind. He knelt by the soaked earth again, light in hand and used his fork to upturn more of the earth. He began to prod deeper into the topsoil mix and down to the soft, soaked earth below, flicking aside the grubs as they crawled across his wrists. And then he touched on something solid. His fork would do no good, so he closed his eyes and plunged wrist deep into the moist soil and came up with the human skull. Ray asked the question he was thinking himself.
Where's the rest of the body?
Casper knelt there for some moments, pondering the question, skull in hand, before pointing towards the marshes. He was most certain of himself, but he knew that he would not find it with Raymond and his dingy little torch tonight. He slipped the skull into a clear plastic bag and tucked it under his arm, and with his sleeves rolled up his arms, he walked with Raymond back up along Mariam Ravine, back to their auto. They'd have to drop the skull off at the lab at the police station for testing in the morning, but maybe Casper could squeeze in a few hours sleep before then.

V

It was nearing noontime and Grissom had spent most of the morning in his observatory, hunched over his maps when Cornwall, his artificially competent assistant entered with a message.
The Detective Bernstein wants to speak to you, sir. He said in a drone. The vistograph chamber is prepared, sir.
Thank you, Cornwall.
Grissom left the observatory and followed Cornwall through his ornately decorated home to the vistograph chamber.
After you, sir.
Cornwall stepped aside, allowing Grissom to enter the small chamber. In the chamber was one seat and a light-tricked image of another. And in this other non-actual seat was Casper.
Casper, my good man! It's been too long since our last meeting.
Casper jumped in his chair, apparently startled.
Sit down, you old fool! Sit down so I can see you. Every time you do this, every time!
I am sorry, my friend. Every time I forget. I rarely use this chamber, it's more for the younger generation I think. I forget I'm not on the vistograph until I'm in the seat. Anyway, how are you?
Fine, fine, now listen, Grissom. Last night I got called out, down to the Mariam Ravine and to the marshes...
No. Tell me it's not true, Cas.
I'm afraid it is.
We were supposed to have three more months before season's end, three months of peace in the valley. Who was it this time?
His name was Grahame Thompson. We only found his skull by the edge of the marshes. Kit ID'd him this morning. As soon as I saw it, I knew what we were in for.
No. No, no, no, no, no. You'd better not be suggesting what I think you are.
We need to check it out. We need to set up an expedition.
Damnit, Bernstein! This just isn't right!
That's why we need to go. And I need you with me. Please.
What? No. No way compadre.
For old time's sake, please. You know there's no better scientist in Berwick, and you know I'll do all I can to make things worthwhile for you.
I'm retired.
I know. Come on. You remember how the department's like with things like this, they'll bend over backwards for anyone willing to risk their own neck down in those parts. I wouldn't be asking if I didn't think you were up for it.
Grissom sighed with the tone of defeat.
Fine. I'll see you when?
Tuesday.
Okay. Berwick airstrip?
No, West U, got some other matters to attend to beforehand. 8AM sharp, at the East entrance. I'll see you there.
Okay.

Grissom got up from his chair, which now faced a blank wall and not the dimensional construction of his friend, the detective. Cornwall was still waiting by the door when he came out of the chamber.
Am I coming too? He asked.
You were listening?
Naturally.

VI

The Berwick airport. It was the biggest this side of the globe. Planes go North, East, West all over the territory. They get the airships for the trips to the further reaches of the country, and for the occasional grand journeys over blue.

Timothy was in Hangar 82, over by the flight school strip towards the East edge of the airport. He was fixing up the Jericho-C33 when Beatrix entered the hangar. He was hanging over the motor, wrench in hand, smothering himself with the guts of the plane.
Are you done fixing my plane? Beatrix asked.
Just about, Bea. Should be running smooth now, just need to put it all back together.
Good, because the professor just got a call from the detective. Apparently he wants to talk to us.
But I haven't done nothing wrong. Tim said, somewhat indignantly.
No, I don't think it's anything like that. Relax, just finish up here and head out to hangar 53, we're going to meet up with him there. Don't keep him waiting, Tim.

Beatrix walked out, leaving Tim to his work, and headed off away from the flight school, over towards the commercial ships. Beatrix was a third year flight student, and in another year she'd be flying the large planes and airships and taking the occasional commercial flight to boost up some experience. Timothy, well he'd been on the airstrip a lot longer. He grew up the son of an engineer, about a quarter of the planes in the airstrip were designed by his father. And Timothy himself just grew up around the area, got into a mechanic apprenticeship in his mid-teens and has been pulling apart and putting back together the planes along the airstrip for near on a decade now.

Beatrix wandered along the airstrip lazily, knowing no real need to rush, as Timothy would still be a while longer putting the motor back together. The hangars were tall as ten elephants standing on eachother's backs and wide as a whale. They were large. It would be something else to describe how long the hangars were down the side. The numbers on the sides of the buildings, however, they stood tall as the stacked elephants, and each numeral was about the width of a standard house. Beatrix counted down from 82 as she walked. It would be a while, she figured, before she reached 53, but the hangars were on both sides of the airstrip, so the numbers went in deuces, like houses. She'd get there soon enough, on the other side of where she walked now. By that time she hoped the detective would have driven across town and caught a lift with the luggage tram by then.

As Beatrix passed the number 62 hangar, she heard a light rambling behind her. She turned around just in time to see Timothy come racing past her on... heaven knows what, some sort of motorised skates? Whatever they were, they were fast. It looked as if Timothy weren't in complete control. He wobbled, and veered out across the airstrip, and stacked. The wildly energetic brass boots still spun like mad, whizzing about in the air as poor showoff Timothy lay sprawled on the bitumen.
Are you okay? Beatrix called out, jogging over to him to see if he was alright.
His shirt was heavily torn and he wore bright pink grazes on his now exposed shoulder and the left side of his face, but he just grinned, wincing slightly.
Serves you right, for ponying around those things like that.
Timothy wrenched them off his feet and switched them off. He got to his feet and said;
Do you want a go?
Oh, um thanks, but no.
Come on, here; I'll turn the speed down on it for you. They won't, ahh, throw you face first into the bitumen or nothing.
Really?
I don't know, they could do. But I don't think so.
Well, ok, if you insist.

Timothy fitted the boots onto Beatrix's feet before switching them into low gear. She rolled ahead excitedly. Some wobbles, but after a moment she balanced out. Out across the airstrip, smooth as. Down alongside the hangars. And then she circled back around to Timothy.
Neat, huh? He called out as she zoomed past.
Yeah.
She headed back out along the hangars again, 59, 57, 55, slipping past effortlessly. 53 she just slipped through the doors and found a seat over my the side. She switched the gear back to neutral and pried them from her feet when the detective entered the hangar.
Quite an impressive toy you've got there, miss.
The name's Beatrix, sir. And these are my friend, Timothy's.
The mechanic boy?
Yes, sir.
Brilliant. My name's Casper, by the way.
It's nice to meet you. I've heard a thing or two about you.
Do you know why I'm here?
No.

Thanks for waiting up, Bea. Timothy said with some annoyance.
Any time. So, detective, now that we're both here, what's this all about?
Can you fly that ship? He pointed towards the airship sitting in the hangar.
The Napoleon XI?I suppose so.
Good. And you, Timothy. Can you fix it?
Of course. What do you plan on doing with it?
We're going to fly it, of course. Out over the valley, to be precise, but there'll be time for details later. If you're up for it, I'd like you two to accompany me on my expedition.
You want me to fly it? Beatrix piped in.
Yes. And I'll need your friend, Timothy here to be with us should anything serious happen.
Like what? She asked, nervously.
Details, my fine lady, details! I'm not even close to prepared.
Casper made for the door before stalling, remembering something;
Oh, one more thing, I'll need you two down at West University, Tuesday at 8AM, sharp. And be prepared! Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Goodbye. Beatrix called to his back, not knowing whether or not he heard.

In the Valley of the Tempest 1:1-3

2009-11-02T20:58:00.002+08:00

Voyager

The tempest stirs, the city trembles, a man dies of unnatural causes.

I

White knuckles tremble as two fists grasp the thin wooden rod used in traditional combat. Splinters. This weapon had been in use at West University for years and years and years. Seth was a second year student, brimming with charisma and blessed with a youthful complexion. It was he who gripped the rod with a menace and leered playfully across the court.
We're not children anymore. Jesse faced Seth, his rod held loosely by his side. Let's not play with toys.
Seth nodded and let his rod fall to the ground all a clutter.

At West University if someone wants something, they fight for it. No backing out. No shoes or shirts, only the muscles on your back and the fists and feet and teeth you bare like blades. And your splintered rod you wield without mercy. You fight in the courtyard, never without a crowd, always with a referree. The rules are; No killing. No breaking of the bones. If you call truce, a truce must be had, no exceptions. The winner is declared when the loser is incapable of standing of their own accord.

Jesse wanted to fight the way of the academics; No sticks to hide behind, just your wits, and your fists. Seth and Jesse were in the centre of the courtyard, on the fighting platform, and many of the students, and several academics were out in the courtyard to view the spectacle. Sticks lain aside, the two met in the centre of the platform, fists raised, ready to pump, pump, pump away at each other, a regular afternoon brawl. Jesse had a left hook that could bring down a buffalo. Seth was much smaller than a buffalo, and less hairy. Yet he was quick as a gun. The referree called the start of the match with a waver of his hand, and the audience grew nearer. Seth held his arms to his chest. He could feel the pulsing adrenaline rush through his body, and he was out of the reach of Jesse's left cannon almost before he began to pump it forth. He snuck in a quick one, two on the shoulder, mostly harmless, and then set his fists down to catch Jesse's swinging left foot.

Kick, punch, dodge, block. The two kept at their eclectic motions until they were swimming in sweat and buzzing with weariness. Jesse's nose was quite beat and bloodied, and his ribs were most likely heavily bruised. Seth had a nasty gash on the top of his head, bleeding quite excessively and swamping his hair in the thick, sticky consistency. And his knee was quite badly jarred. A truce was called, a moment taken to smear the blood from Seth's face and place a tape over Jesse's nose. To the audience witnessing this fight, it was just a regular afternoon.

II

I think the axle's warped, huffed Lenny Winters as he pulled his gyrowheel upright and limped heavily out of the bush.
He had been racing Buzz again down along the Mariam Ravine. If he had swerved the other way off his wheel, he would have tumbled over the ravine, and he wouldn't have seen the body down further, at the edge of the marshes.

Hey Buzz, get over here and take a look at this! He wandered further along the ravine, down to where the marshes were visible.
Lenny walked his gyrowheel along the ravine, Buzz motoring genlty beside, craning his neck to see what Lenny was so captivated by.
What is it? What am I looking for? Buzz asked in between his chortling on the throttle.
Down there at the edge of the marshes, it looks like a person's sleeping down there.
With that Buzz hammered the throttle and took his gyrowheel speeding down the ravine's edge, Lenny just pacing along behind with his wheel slightly askew. Even at mild speeds he wouldn't risk a little ride. He saw Buzz slide to a halt with the dust billowing up in his wake. He saw Buzz in the distance, walking up to the body and leaning over it. A moment later he staggered back and climbed back in his wheel, with a loud whine of the motor and another cascade of dust as he raced back up the ravine, back up to Lenny.

He's dead. Buzz said, his face flushed of its colour. We need to get back to the city.
Lenny knew when Buzz was joking, and this time he had no doubts when following him on the long hike back up to the city. The Mariam Ravine ran for kilometres down from the city out arind the valley. Occasionally some joker fell down and was never heard of until months later. Although there was no way of knowing how long the body had been lying near the swamp before Buzz and Lenny spotted him, it was too far down the ravine where the high and the low began to merge into one. It was no accident.

It was around midnight, one o'clock in the morning when the two made their way back along the ravine. Buzz putted along beside Lenny, who just wearily walked his wheel along. Mere minutes before, they'd been revelling in their regular thrills of slamming their wheels down along the ravine as fast as they could go, a regular rat race, dodging and weaving the rocks and thistle bushes that littered the cragged rock as it warped and zagged out over the valley. Upwards of 200 kilometres per hour, nothing made your chest swell quite like it. There was something about the aerodynamic costumes, the round-shouldered posture, the fibreglass helmets and tightly strapped leather goggles, it all just felt so amazing, like you could roar boastful as the shining brass vehicles you sat upon. That was Lenny and Buzz up until the crash in the thistle bush. And with each passing moment came a deep unsettling tension.

They didn't speak again until the ravine turned into the barren strip of land that ran to the city's South. Lenny sat back onto his gyrowheel and gently rode it up the strip back into the city. The faint glowing aura of Berwick's South suburbs growing nearer on the horizon.

The street lamps stuttered in the night time, casting broken light upon the twisted streets of the outer suburbs. The two young men walked their machines down the road, knowing full well that their night will grow ever more longer and ever more exhausting. They were headed for the police station, but they planned on dropping their gyrowheels by Lenny's autoshop on the way. It was a bit of a detour, but they'd be able to drive to the police in an auto from there. Almost anything would be better than lugging those bulky wheels through town. So they locked the wheels in the shed at the back of Lenny's and went into the garage to get the auto running. The tank was only filled half, so they linked the hose up to the hand pump to top it off. And then Lenny stoked the ignition, flicked on the headlamps, revved out the accelerator and then they were on the road. Five minutes down the road and they were at the police station trying their best to recall what the lifeless human shape looked like in the darkness.

III

One thirty in the morning is not the best time to receive phone calls. It was offiver Raymond Somerville again with yet another 'emergency'. Detective Casper Bernstein slipped on his evening shoes reluctantly and headed downstairs to make himself a coffee. No matter how urgent the emergency, the wake-up routine was still elementary. A well prepared mind a few moments late is always better than a fatigued mind on time, as Casper so frequently says. It was in fifteen minutes that he found himself in full uniform down at the station, taking the statements of two young midnight joyriders. He stifled a yawn in between sips of his second cup of morning juice. He held a pen loosely in his hand and watched the two, Buzz and Lenny, sitting at the small table in a room that smelled of fear.

Lenny spoke first. He told Casper about the race down the Mariam Ravine, about the crash, about the sleeping man down by the marshes. He said how Buzz went down there, came back and said the guy was dead.
Did you touch the body? Casper asked Buzz.
No. Why would I want to do that?
Curiosity. It happens. You see a guy, you might think he's sleeping. You poke him with a stick. You roll him over and you see half his intestines hanging out his front. Your bloody stick is bagged, tagged and put into evidence. You didn't touch him, all you got is your footprints and your tyre tracks and your words. What did you see?
Well, it was dark, but after Lenny fell, I slowed down. He rolled out of the thistles no more hurt than usual, and he's seen this guy sleeping, just like he said. So him having the busted wheel no good, I went down there ahead of him. He was gonna come down and see for himself, but when I got there, I didn't want him to see it. This was like no one could mistake him for a sleeping guy up close. I don't even want to tell you what I saw.
Try, please. It's important.
Okay. Well, first I notice, he is dead. He's been bleeding from a hole in the neck for a long time, I think. It was all dried like, and there was a lot of dark patches in the dirt and weed. Then I see there's something moving, crawling over him, and I think, maggots. He's been here so long, they've been eating at him and if I waited much longer, there wouldn't be much left of him. That's what I thought, but when I saw something crawling on him I just grabbed my wheel and got out of there real quick. Then I told Lenny he was dead and we came here.
We stopped by my autoshop to drop the wheels off and get the auto, Lenny said.
Is that everything? Casper asked.
Buzz and Lenny both responded with a curt nod.
Well, thank you for your time. I'll stay in contact if we need to go over anything again. Have a safe trip home.
He got to his feet and invited his interviewees out the door. And then the real business began.

Detective Casper Bernstein had been in his position for some fifteen years now, after serving loyally to the Berwick Police Academy for another ten years prior. His stature was all that dwelt within dreams of the officers fresh out of training, the Raymond Somervilles of the world. Yet it was often enough that Casper would find himself beneath mountains of assignments too sensitive for other men to touch. He was the pride of the academy, and with the pride came the duty. So he opened a file on this mystery death down near the marshes, and he stored the Butterworth/Winters interview therein. It was two o'clock when Casper drove down to the ravine to unpack the crime scene, with the officer on duty, Ray, standing in as his number two guy.

My goals for the near future:

2009-10-28T19:11:00.003+08:00

Well, as always, I'm working to build up my short story repertoire. I'm starting to get a nice amount of short horror stories that are around the 4,000+ word limit More stories like that would be great.

I've also begun sending a few stories to magazines for potential publication. I've already had "A Note For Elizabeth" published in the Curtin student guild magazine Grok (2009, edition 4) here in Perth, as well as two poems "Friday Night Pyrotechnics" and "Motivation" in edition 5 of this same year. Since then I've sent a flash fiction, "Granite" and a short story "The Timekeeper" to a literary magazine called DotDotDash, also located here in Perth. I should hear back from them next month. Also, I was encouraged by a fellow writer to submit a short story to Reed Magazine over in San Jose, California. I sent in "The Butcher of Krankhafte", and I think it might be a while before I hear back from them, but I'm certainly excited at the potential prospect of a publication all the way over in the US.

I've also been scouring the web for magazines and publishers to look at in the future, and I've come across an Australian Sci-Fi and Fantasy magazine called Aurealis. I'm considering sending in "Flonkerton". I might also write something for the next edition of DotDotDash, as submissions for that have opened up, and my Creative Writing teacher, who's been very supportive of me all semester, is hopefully going to get me in contact with a friend of his, who is currently running a literary journal in its early stages. The idea is for me to write something and send it in, mention my tutor's name, and I should be ready to rock and roll.

I've had three online literary podcasts for quite some time now, Pseudopod, Escape Pod and PodCastle, none of which I've submitted my stories to yet. I'd love to, really, I would, but nothing I've written so far feels "right". So hopefully one of these days I'll get the creative juices flowing (pardon the cliche) and actually send something in to those guys. The concept is really cool, and I'd love to get in on that.

Another thing my tutor's got me thinking about is radioplays. My last Creative Writing assesment for the year is a five page (translates to five minutes) script. I've chosen a radioplay that's starting out quite well. When I started writing, I never imagined myself coming up with a realist radioplay where the central theme is religion. That's "The Garden". So I was talking with my tutor about radioplays last week, and he mentioned how popular they've become in New Zealand and Britain quite recently, and how it'd be worthwhile getting in touch with Australian radio stations (he mentioned ABC's Radio National), so that's another goal I'd love to work towards; a radioplay on national radio.

And I'm sure some of you are aware of my participation in next month's National Novel Writing Month (see previous blog for plot and details), and my goals for that have stretched beyond the simple 50,000 words. I'm getting into the mindframe where I will finish the novel, no niggling voice inside my head stating otherwise. Not even an imagination of my tutor perplexed at taking less than four or five years on a novel can deter. I've got a rough plot of nine "parts", each separated into about a dozen (or so) "chapters", nice and condensed, so it should be easy to belt through it. I've got pages and pages of plot summary, character names and brief descriptions and settings. In November, I write, regardless of what quality comes out, I'll make the backspace key my worst enemy.

In December, I'll edit. If that goes well, I'll start sending manuscripts off to publishers. I've found three that will accept unpublished novelists. The first choice is Allen & Unwin. They're based over in the eastern states of Australia, and they've got a section on their site called the "Friday Pitch". Basically, I send in my first chapter, and a week later, I'll know whether they'll look at it further or not. They're my first pick primarily because of the time frame. Fingers crossed that'll work out, otherwise, it'll be a quick knockback, no waiting around.

Then I'll try my luck with Fremantle Press. They're located in Fremantle (as strange as that sounds), driving distance from my home here in Perth. They'll take roughly two to four months. Their big bonus is that they're located in Western Australia, and they're dedicated to Western Australia. They only publish fiction that was written by WA residents, so that narrows the field down a bit. They've also published some successful science fiction novels. So they're not limiting writers to realist novels set in this state.

Then it's the UK based Macmillan New Writing sub-division of Pan-Macmillan, although they seem rigid on the contract, however, publishing a first novel with them would open things up for a second novel with them, and later novels with the parent company, Pan-Macmillan, an established writer's publisher. That's a definite plus side.

If they don't work out, I'll save up some cash, probably hire an artist, head over to Lulu.com and publish the novel myself. Although I'll look into that option a lot more when the time comes around, I know little of how I'd distribute the books.

On another note, I updated my "master file" of all my short stories, poems, scripts and works in progress. Over almost two years, I've written over 80,000 words and well over 400,000 characters of fiction. Which is comforting. I mean, this means that I could easily write a solid novel in a couple of years alongside Uni, with more thorough planning than NaNoWriMo and more effort put into the best writing quality possible.

Yep. I've got a lot to look forward to in the future.

NaNoWriMo prep.

2009-10-26T21:02:00.002+08:00

In less than a week I'll start writing "In the Valley of the Tempest" for the National Novel Writing Month in November. 30 days, 50,000 words, 1 novel. Right now I'm in my last week of University for the year, and I've got assignments looming left, right and centre. Last assignment is due next Thursday or Friday (I vaguely recall someone mentioning the 6th). Two 2,000 word textual analyses, seven film journals (3 pages each), twenty tutorial journals for Literary and Cultural Studies (this one shouldn't take long) and a five minute radioplay. (The Garden).

Once they're done I'll be able to sink my teeth into this novel. In the Valley of the Tempest is set in a fictional Steampunk universe in the city of Berwick which sits atop the edge of a valley where strange occurences take place.

"The tempest stirs. The city trembles. A man dies of unnatural causes."

The novel begins with Seth and Jesse shrugging aside their mutual respect for eachother and taking to the courtyard with knuckles bared. They fight to make history. The victor of the fight will be the youngest person to join an expedition out into the valley. The mysterious death of Grahame Thompson barely out of city limits at the edge of the valley has sparked furious debate as to what goes on down in the valley. Something in the valley has caused the untimely death of Grahame, and the Board of Academics has nominated Chief Detective Casper Bernstein to head the expedition. They wait with baited breath from the moment the team departs from Berwick Airport in the bitter cold pre-dawn hours of the morning.

In the Valley of the Tempest, you will find mountains of iron ore hovering metres from the ground as they resist the magnetic forces of the world. You will find lakes so deep, swimming with mechanical fish so grand you will forget they are machines. You will find secrets so dark that the death of Grahame is only a singular raindrop in a vast, churning, chopping ocean of troubles.

Coming November 2009.

Friday Night Pyrotechnics

2009-10-24T21:20:00.000+08:00

Brakes failing, a crash,
I heard it from my IKEA living room,
my Snörk.

There were people on the street,
crowding around the wreck.

The nuclear family in flames,
trapped in their Japanese import,
trapped by the overbearing crowd.

No room,
There’s no room to escape,
They roast.

Fascination towards violence,
towards disaster,
no one rushes to save them,
no one calls for help.

Don't want to get their hands dirty.

They watch the show,
pyrotechnics, Friday night.

Forgot the popcorn.

And they just watch the smoke
mushroom skyward.

We're all the same, really,
except they're out there,
and I'm in here, by the window,
watching.